February 23, 2022 | Stamford, CT — For the past decade, Asian banks have used technology investments to become more efficient and lower costs. Today, the largest banks in the region are using their IT spending for a new reason: to keep up with their clients.  

To date, banks in Asia have focused their technology investments first on digitizing internal operations to make them more efficient, and then on digitizing client interfaces. 

“Rapid shifts in corporate business models are forcing banks to reassess how they spend technology budgets by creating both valuable new opportunities and wade off emerging threats,” says Gaurav Arora, Head of Asia at Coalition Greenwich.

On the opportunity front, banks have invested heavily in their own digital platforms are in a strong position help clients build out the infrastructure and processes needed to support new multi-distribution models. On the risk side, there are now many non-bank/fintech players offering solutions for payments and other functions. 

The banks included in the list of 2022 Greenwich Share and Quality Leaders in Asian Large Corporate Banking and Cash Management have developed the digital capabilities needed to meet many of these new demands and they are investing heavily to acquire capabilities that will be required to service large corporates with evolving models in the future. 

HSBC tops the list of 2022 Greenwich Share Leaders in Corporate Banking with the industry’s highest market penetration, followed by Standard Chartered Bank, Citi, DBS, and BNP Paribas. The 2022 Greenwich Quality Leader in Asian Large Corporate Banking is ANZ Bank. 

HSBC also leads the list of 2022 Greenwich Share Leaders in Large Corporate Cash Management followed by Citi, Standard Chartered Bank, DBS, and BNP Paribas. The 2022 Greenwich Quality Leaders in Cash Management are Bank of America, BNP Paribas, DBS, and J.P. Morgan. 

A number of banks are also recognized as Greenwich Leaders for the 2022 Greenwich Excellence Awards in several important categories across Asian Large Corporate Banking and Asian Large Corporate Cash Management.

Given the makeup of those lists, it is clear that technology demands are playing to the strengths of the biggest banks and giving them a significant competitive advantage. In Asian large corporate banking, however, pure scale is no guarantee of success. As the Asian region is so heterogeneous and geographically dispersed, even banks with the biggest technology budgets will struggle to win corporate banking clients if they cannot offer a strong network proposition in a given country.

Full list of 2022 Greenwich Excellence, Share and Quality Leaders: Asian Large Corporate Banking and Cash Management.