Bank pricing strategies typically combine cost of funds, risk, regulatory requirements, informal assessments of the market, and competitor insights. While these factors form the basis of pricing, traditional pricing approaches often overlook real-time market dynamics such as regional trends, industry-specific factors, and customer segments. With rising competition, evolving customer expectations, regulatory pressures, and macroeconomic shifts, addressing these gaps is critical to maintaining profitability and growth.

What Real-Time Market Intelligence Delivers

A successful pricing strategy today needs to consider the market context and balance it against cost to serve. Banks need integrated solutions that feed market intelligence and benchmark prices directly into their workflows to ensure data-backed decision making. Industry benchmarks can provide market data including fees and interest rates. For instance, it may show that 75% of banks in a region offer rates within a certain range, enabling more competitive and market-aligned pricing decisions. Market intelligence can also be highly segmented to provide more relevant insights:

• Geography: Reflects prevalent rates in a specific region

• Industry vertical: Shows standard rates for customers in that particular sector

• Customer size: Categorized by revenue tiers (large, mid-sized, small)

Such data provides relationship managers with current insights into the market reality for the product and segment. Bankers can use this information to set pricing targets or ceilings anchored to percentiles, enabling them to make competition-aware decisions, either matching market rates to stay relevant in specific regions or industries, or pursue premium strategies where appropriate.

Product managers can use this intelligence to define standard price points, design product bundles, and set rules around customer commitments, enabling banks to develop competitive and strategic pricing frameworks.

Embedded, Real-Time, and Visual by Design

When market intelligence is integrated into existing pricing workflows, it provides real-time, visually intuitive insights, so teams don’t have to leave the system.

How does this work? The relationship manager gets the prospect details and selects the right products and services for their needs. At this point, they can view benchmarks and get insights without leaving the process flow, enabling them to offer the best price.

Further, during the annual price review, relationship managers must assess the current market rates, while also tracking whether the customer has met commitments such as minimum value, volume, or balance thresholds. With this information, they can make a data-backed pricing revisions.

Governance & Auditability

Banking is one of the most tightly regulated sectors in the world and bank pricing must reflect not just competition and cost but also consider regulatory requirements. Embedding market benchmarks into the pricing process ensures ample documentation and provides evidence for every decision taken. Banks can clearly demonstrate the exact percentiles, peer banks, and segment filters used to arrive at a pricing decision, helping them defend their pricing, ensure regulatory compliance, and maintain a complete audit trail for transparency and accountability.

The same benchmark view can provide a common reference point for occasions when a deal requires exceptions. This ensures that deviations are handled consistently, and approvers can see where the proposed price sits relative to the market distribution and can capture the rationale in the same system. Taken together, benchmarks must provide the objective anchor; the workflow must capture the who/what/why; and the resulting record must show that prices were set with evidence, not guesswork.

Redefine Pricing with SunTec

The good news is that such a product is already in the market. SunTec has partnered with industry, leading financial benchmark providers to transform pricing in the banking sector. By combining SunTec’s powerful pricing and billing engine with the analytics and benchmark engine of its partner organizations, we can help banks improve profitability with competitive prices and informed decision-making.

This joint solution is powered by a robust, API-based integration, designed for speed, flexibility, and ease of use. Insights and benchmarks are directly integrated within SunTec’s Deal Pricing   and Account Analysis products, so teams can access them within existing workflows without manual uploads or juggling different platforms. Relationship managers can easily devise a data-powered pricing strategy, while banks can improve the renewal process with client level impact analysis to ensure faster renewals and stronger margins.

For institutions ready to operationalize this shift, SunTec’s enhanced deal management product unifies the data, workflows, and controls needed to drive profitable growth — turning speculation into evidence at every step.