EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2012 and early 2013 were uncertain times for corporate and investment banks around the
world, which saw a slight uptick in the financing businesses (driven mostly by the growing
emerging markets) while capital markets remained hesitant (fixed income in particular,
which dropped in the first quarter of 2013 after performing well in 2012).
After years of prosperity and exceptional returns on equity (>15%), many CIB decision
makers seized this sluggish period to work on profitability, initiating much needed cost
initiatives, impacting their cost-income ratios to greater or lesser degrees.
But the environment of the industry is still changing and those changes are here to stay:
for instance, "shadow banking" is increasingly addressing corporate needs, and regulations
are becoming more and more stringent (and divergent between countries).
CIB leaders can no longer wait and see. Hence, we believe that despite all the challenges
surrounding them, regulatory uncertainties especially, the time has come for CIBs to resume
boosting their top lines through sales effectiveness initiatives, and to proactively write their
own futures by clarifying their positioning through one of four coherent business models:
> Category killer
> Niche product specialist
> Solution provider/aggregator
> Trusted advisor