A large number of banks in the 1990s shifted from retail banking to wholesale and investment banking. During that time, Initial Public Offering (IPO) and other security deals, regarded as 'sexy' are high margin activities that generated enormous cash flows. Retail banking was considered "old fashioned" as it was high volume, labor-intensive and low-margin.
With the economic downturn, the number of major deals fell dramatically and revenues collapsed accordingly. To maintain profit growth, most firms reverted to cost-cutting measures. However, there is only so much an organization can do to reduce cost in that way. In order to stop the downward trends in revenue-making, banks and insurers re-look at their service portfolio and decided to take up on their "forgotten" activity - retail.
Is your organization ready to regain lost ground? Many organizations ask themselves how much available information they readily have on their customers. Despite significant investments in CRM-tools, most Information Systems (IS) do not span multiple Business Units. What is the role of your Information Technology (IT) organization when it comes to bridging this gap?
