A second category of front-office fintechs is focusing on enabling banks to increase retention by improving the client experience and helping banks embed themselves into their clients’ workflow. Indeed, until recently, most front-office applications were built in-house, available only on specific platforms, and siloed under a thin layer of integration at the level of the user experience. Today, driven by the adop- tion of a suite of HTML5 technologies, this situation is changing as the industry moves toward a more flexible user experience model. Fintechs can now enable banks to create a smooth and unified client experience that tracks behavior across different platforms. Moreover, new fintech offerings such as multi-issuer structured product platforms allow banks to match products with investors’ risk preferences, thus shifting product governance to more client-driven, self-service solutions that avoid inappropriate selling. The reality is that many investment banks lag behind organizations in other indus- tries when it comes to tracking customer satisfaction, at a time when customer ex- pectations have increased substantially. Banks thus have an immense opportunity to leverage predictive-modeling solutions that blend financial-market and client transaction data to understand and anticipate client needs. Use cases vary from es- tablishing client profiles and predicting demand for certain products to forecasting the propensity to issue equity or debt or to perform block trades. Partnerships with fintechs can also reduce the time to market for proprietary prod- Partnerships with ucts and services and increase revenue. For example, Goldman Sachs collaborated fintechs can reduce with Motif Capital to issue structured products that express the unique thematic the time to market for views of clients. proprietary products and services and Streamlining Costs. Most fintech enablers in the CM ecosystem have a lower-cost increase revenue. component in their value proposition and can thus provide investment banks with an alternative route to additional efficiency gains. Consider the modern trading desk, for example, which is evolving to adopt a unified communication approach that merges channels, such as voice and electronic (including digitizing voice trading through speech recognition). Services that enable trading from any location, while leveraging cloud-computing services, could become ubiquitous in the future. Such software could eliminate large portions of legacy systems and costly private- communication lines, as well as improve overall asset productivity. By moving to internet-based cloud-computing services, investment banks can rent computing power and hardware in a way that efficiently meets fluctuating demand. In addition, mutualizing costs in post-trade and support is a particularly attractive opportunity, the benefits of which have yet to be fully realized. Current utility play- ers are still nascent, and adoption is slow because the market remains fragmented. Meanwhile, process automation is expected to maintain momentum across both front- and back-office activities as machines continue to replace human workers. Some of the most promising areas are intelligent processing, which can be found in functions as varied as robotics and machine learning systems, and the application of distributed ledger technology for settlement, confirmation, and reconciliations. Other potential areas to realize cost efficiencies include connectivity and order management systems in fixed-income and trader communications. The Boston Consulting Group 11