Global corporate banking and capital markets have seen substantial change in the last few years. There is new competition from online brokerages and, most recently, there has been a drop in transactions for debt and equity markets, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings. As banks seek to position themselves for economic rebound, a well documented wave of employee layoffs and other cost reductions were undertaken.

We believe that players in the investment-banking and capital markets sector will need to continue responding to a range of trends, including:

• Regulatory reform will substantially change the way banks think about their credit, market, and portfolio risks.
  
• Changing the risk organization to deliver these effectively will need more than just a re-shuffle of people. Banks will need to rethink their risk processes, the interfaces between risk management and the wider business, and the capabilities of their risk organization to ensure that regulatory changes can be delivered effectively
  
• Industry convergence and market structure shifts, which have positioned participants around customer results; the redefinition of the business; overcapacity and consolidation on a global, regional, and local scale; and several de novo value chain plays. Banks must position themselves to take advantage of market changes, by assessing their own positioning and opportunities for consolidation, and then restructure the organization, extracting as much value as possible
  
• Increased demand for customer-focused organizations that offer tailored value propositions and high-quality customer service across all channels. Institutions must improve their service to customers, without imposing additional strain on the business model through redundant systems and costs
  
• Pressure to extract value from the operations/technology processing environments, recognizing technology as a driver of industrialization, which has an impact on innovation and scale and unbundles manufacturing and distribution
  
• Evolving organizational models, which are separating manufacturing and distribution and redefining the value chain
  
• Shifts in capital flows to emerging markets and new asset classes.