Watch the FT Live Digital Dialogues: Digitalizing Investment Banking Operations

October 07, 2022

In partnership with the Financial Times, Clare Hart, CEO, Williams Lea, joined a panel of operational leaders to talk about how they are using the latest technology and outsourcing to manage today’s challenging operating environment, reduce costs and become more competitive.

Clare was joined by Marnix van Stiphout, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Transformation Officer at ING, and Stuart Riley, Global Head of Technology for the Institutional Clients Group at Citi. The conversation was chaired by Jonathan Guthrie, Head of Lex at the Financial Times.

The webcast recording is available to view on-demand.

Here are some of the key points made during the discussion:

• Operational challenges. Investment banks are addressing many operational issues, one of which is return-to-office requirements and office space allocation following the pandemic. After two-and-a-half years of remote and hybrid working, banks are evaluating how much office space they need, and how many functions they can outsource so they do not need as many office staff.
• Transaction volumes. Transaction volumes have reached such high levels that banks do not have enough people to capture them all, so they need to digitalize.
• Straight-through-processing and robotic process automation. A lot of effort has gone into Straight-Through-Processing (STP) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in recent years, but investment banks are still not that good at it and it has not improved efficiency much. Initiatives like these need to be modelled properly.
• AI is not a destroyer of jobs. Businesses have been automating for decades, even hundreds of years, and in most cases they have created jobs rather than destroyed them. AI is not used to eliminate jobs, but to make jobs easier and to remove manual processes that do not add value to customers.