Voice of the customer
Context:
- A global bank had identified opportunities to make their trade and supply chain finance (TF & SCF) solutions more sophisticated and relevant to customers across the APAC region
- The new offering would include digital capabilities such as API connectivity, fully digitised transaction processing, and partnering with bank agnostic 3rd party platforms
- To ensure their investment in growth was effective, the bank was seeking expert advice to:
- align their platform build to the needs of their customers (current and target)
- prioritise their country rollout strategy and define their go-to-market approach to clients.
Accelerated’s approach to the research:
- The project was led by a Collaboration Partner (CP) with consulting experience and almost 20 years as a senior banking executive
- Over four weeks our CP conducted 9 in-depth interviews with CFOs or similar and oversaw a B2B survey of more than 50 participants across Singapore, India, Thailand and Australia.
Synopsis:
- Most participants forecast increases in their TF & SCF volumes, particularly across Singapore and India
- There was consistent evidence of multiple bank relationships in this space. Except for Australia, the majority of respondents use three or more banks to service their SCF & TF needs
- Respondents expressed a willingness to consider alternative providers for SCF & TF given they already use a combination of global and local banks. When considering diversifying banking relationships in this space geographic reach and innovation/technology were the two key decision criteria that emerged
- Digitisation was becoming increasingly prevalent and important across supply chains, with respondents generally only having made modest progress to-date
- There was a strong recognition of a need to accelerate digitisation in this area with COVID accelerating trends. This included a desire to incorporate advanced data analytics and visualisation, with tools such as excel or components of their ERP system being most commonly used for any of this type of analysis
- There has been limited adoption of existing 3rd party SCF & TF platforms, with most organisations using existing bank-provided solutions. This lack of adoption and any dominant player creates challenges but also opportunities to drive the 3rd party provider market across the region.
