Market intel - not just price - key to insto banking

But along with that market intel there needs to be better coordination between bank business units, whether that is product and relationship management or, increasingly, operations and risk personnel.

“That kind of market information may be quite functional like with a letter of credit where we can talk to our customer about the form of data presentation they can get from their customers to speed up decision making,” he tells BlueNotes.

“They can then go to their customer and tell them if the data is in this form it can speed up the finance, that’s a business edge.”

Géczy argues one of the advantages of ANZ’s network, across 33 countries, is the ability to look over cross border transactions.

“If you look at iron ore trade, for example, given our corridor and dominant role in trade finance in that market, we can see where the market is going. So that’s a market insight but also it’s a competitive insight.”

Géczy was speaking to BlueNotes on the release of the latest Peter Lee Associates Relationship and Transaction Banking surveys for Australia. ANZ was rated No.1 for Overall Lead Banking Penetration and on the Relationship Strength Index (RSI), up from No.2 on the latter measure in 2013.

“With relationship banking our customers are concerned about the coordination between our people, not just the customer facing people but everyone involved in the client’s business,” Géczy says.

“For transactional banking, there is a great focus on consistency. I was talking to one of our customers the other night, the CEO, and I asked him what he thought of our transaction banking and his response was he had heard nothing bad. To him that means we are doing quite well.”

Géczy says that while new technology and access to data are changing the nature of banking in many businesses, institutional and corporate banking remains high touch: “the value is in people”.

That said, this category of customer is increasingly looking to their bank for data analysis and insights.

“That might be market data like foreign exchange, interest rates, but it is also market insights, political insights,” Géczy says.

Underlying that though is operational consistency and reliability and Géczy says one of his focuses is to improve the consistency of the transaction platform. “This is a technical challenge but all our customers care about is whether the system is up and running,” he says.