Self awareness is rare in banking. But for many of the global banks, the penny does seem to have dropped that they cannot be all things to all clients. Pre-crisis, the talk was of end-to-end solutions, being on both sides of the trade and having a full global footprint. These days the ambitions are more tempered.
Banks are facing huge external challenges liquidity is at a premium regulations are being drafted that will punish extended global operations and transactional banking business and capital costs are all on the rise. Banks know that they will have to do more with less. And one of the key strategies they are adopting in...