BCG Report - Creating Value in Banking 2009

Over the past 12 months, everyone's become an expert on the Global Financial Crisis. And there's no shortage of commentary about how to fix things in the banking industry.

In contrast, Boston Consulting Group has been publishing its annual banking industry report for seven years now. For any Exari customers who haven't had a chance to digest the contents, here are some of the key takeaways from Living with New Realities: Creating Value in Banking 2009.

Global Issues

Global market capitalization has decreased 63% from US $8.8 trillion in Q3 2007 to US $3.3 trillion in Jan 2009.

The pre-crisis global titan approach (adopted by the likes of Citibank and RBS) will give way to large vertically integrated banks where common IT platforms and other economies of scale will allow them to keep their cost-to-income ratios at or below 45%.

The majority of their revenues will come from traditional universal banking (i.e. retail and commercial), and by doing fewer things better.

Business Banking Operations

Improve sales force productivity - productive banks can generate 3.6 times more revenue per sales resource than their peers.

Strengthen risk management - goes without saying.

Control costs along the entire value chain - differentiate between standard and non-standard credit products. Standard products can be processed efficiently. It can be difficult to know whether non-standard products are profitable on a fully costed basis.

National Banking Sectors

Highest average return on equity (16.5%) achieved in Australia and Spain. Other than Canada (10.7%), ROE in all other major banking sectors in developed markets was below 10% (UK 9.8%; USA 8.3%; Germany -3.8%).

No matter what area of banking you're in, it's well worth reading the full report.

And if you want to improve your business banking operations through automation, see how Exari can speed up your processes while reducing costs and risk.

Corporate Counsel Survey Report Released

At Exari we think about contracts all the time. How to make them better, how to make templates smarter, how lawyers and their contracts can benefit from contract automation.

With the fall of Lehman Brothers and the AIG controversy it seems that now lots of people are also thinking about contracts. So we decided to take the pulse of approximately 100 major corporations in a recent survey.

Here are some of our results:

• Sales contracts are the dominant contract type in most companies, with over 70% of respondents spending time on them.
  


• With close to 90% of respondents being General Counsel or other in-house attorneys, it's not surprising that most (about half) singled out contracting errors by sales and other front line business staff as the biggest risk and pain during contract creation. Nonetheless, about a quarter of respondents named the high cost (28%) or the slow pace (23%) of having contracts reviewed by Legal as the biggest pain for their company.

• For 62% of companies, Legal review consumes 4 hours or more per contract, which equates to 12,000 hours annually if Legal reviews 250 contracts per month.
  

To read the complete 14 page report which includes 21 informative charts and graphs, take our survey for yourself and then download a free copy. Or you can simply register to download the 4 page Highlights Summary.

If you’d like to create your own contract to see for yourself the benefits of document assembly software, try our NDA or Services Agreement demo.