How to keep a corporate customer

If corporate banking customers are unhappy with the customer service their bank offers them, the chances of them leaving are higher today than ever before, was the stern warning by panellists at the recent summit organised by billing and pricing software supplier, Zafin. Steve Murphy, research director at CEB Tower Group, cited research that the 68 per cent of corporates will not hesitate to move to another bank if they feel their current provider is not offering them top service.
So what are the areas that banks should be particularly aware of in building, in Zafin’s words, ‘the optimal customer experience’? Murphy highlighted the need for integration between systems to provide ‘consistent experience’. Also, more streamlined and automated KYC checks, facilitated by e-documentation, is an area Murphy thinks banks should invest in. ‘The adoption of e-documentation in the corporate finance space is still low,’ he lamented.

Lovell Hodge, associate vice-president at Canada-based TD Bank, emphasised the importance of taking into consideration the tech-savvy clients. ‘Any customer onboarding process these days must take this into consideration,’ he stated. ‘And from then on, customers should be able to interact with the bank when they want and how they want.’ For the bank that means more investment in automation and centralisation. ‘Legacy systems do not interact with each other well’, he observed, and as a rule these are the systems large corporate banks tend to have. Centralised data – a single customer information file (CIF) – is crucial to ensure the full view of the customer, he said, ‘particularly when dealing with multinational corporations’.

Luc Caulier, deputy global head of cash management at BNP Paribas, also highlighted the complexities arising from dealing with multinational clients. ‘You need to connect all the right tubes of the customer with the all the right tubes of the bank.’ The main pain point is the complexity of regulations across multiple jurisdictions. Each European country has its own regulatory and compliance requirements, which means that BNP Paribas cannot ‘onboard a customer with one set of documents and one click of a button like it could twenty years ago’, Caulier said. And while BNP Paribas can provide dedicated staff that will walk a major corporation through the intricacies of multi-jurisdiction regulations, what is a smaller company to do, he asked. Unlike top-tier clients, smaller entities don’t have the luxury of having their hand held throughout the process. To address this, BNP Paribas is rolling out a new customer onboarding solution that will present a customer with a full set of documents required for each country. And even thought a small and mid-tier corporate customer will still have to work through many aspects under its own steam, at least it will have a full set of requirements and instructions presented to them, country by country.

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