Rationalising Global Connections to Drive Costs Down, Visibility Up

Over the past fifteen years, investment banks have seen a massive expansion in global connectivity, encompassing hundreds of links to exchanges and buy side clients as well as infrastructure to backup sites.

This complex connectivity infrastructure is business critical, delivering reliable resiliency, but is also very expensive, from hardware to leased lines and exchange memberships. There is, without doubt, both significant duplication and under-utilisation of these key resources.

Challenges to implementing dynamic pricing in financial services

Legacy IT systems

The roadblock to real pricing execution lies in bank legacy core systems. Just a reminder, legacy systems are costly. A study by IBM suggests that rigid legacy systems cost the industry $200 billion annually, and siphons off roughly 20% of pre-tax profits. 

Let that sink in for a moment. 

The strategic importance of dynamic pricing in financial services

At its foundation, dynamic pricing is simply flexible pricing based on current market demands for a particular product or service. It is second nature to the hospitality and travel industries, even the retail goods market, where algorithms account for competitive pricing, supply and demand, time of day, and on-demand service spikes to affect an ever-changing real time price and profit margin. 

But in banking, dynamic pricing is a different story: more of a Utopic dream than a reality, with some nuances unique to the industry.