Commercial banks are operating under incredible pressure amidst net interest margin compression, increasing competition, and rising cost pressures. Even as these factors impact profitability and growth, they are also reshaping the basics of relationship banking, with 72% of large corporates actively reviewing their banking relationships.¹ Corporate treasurers want real-time visibility into their accounts for better cash forecasting and liquidity management. And banks want better deal close rates, commitment tracking, and improved customer deal lifecycle management. They are now realizing that the much-neglected function of account analysis can deliver what they need. The opportunity lies in using account analysis insights to shape deals, optimize pricing, and structure competitive offers.

Account Analysis: From Passive Reporting to Active Intelligence

Traditionally, account analysis served as a monthly statement that itemized fees, listed transactions, and showed earnings credits offsetting service costs. This was a retrospective activity with limited strategic impact. But this does not deliver the real-time visibility or the intelligent insights that corporate customers demand today. A modernized account analysis function can be a dynamic intelligence layer that offers strategic insights.  It can deliver:

• Granular service consumption patterns across payments, liquidity, channels, and cash management
• Visibility into earnings credits, average balances, fee offsets, and unutilized value
• True cost drivers at the customer, account, and service levels
• Behavioral insights on volumes, thresholds, breakage, and seasonality

The Convergence of Account Analysis and Deal Structuring

Today most banks are looking for ways to provide relationship managers with intelligent insights for creating profitable, relationship-based deals. A modernized account analysis function can do just this to transform deal pricing and bundle offerings. This requires banks to eliminate manual batch processing with API-driven integrations. It will help them to transfer data in real time, eliminate delays, and provide both operations teams and corporate treasurers with immediate visibility into fees, usage, and commitment status.​

Let’s break down how the convergence between account analysis and deal management happens and the key elements involved:

• Data Foundation: Data lies at the heart of customer-centric banking including the account analysis statement and deal management. For instance, RFP data can be ingested automatically in pre-existing deal templates. Further, insights based on transactions, customer behavior, cash flow patterns, service usage patterns, and profitability metrics can be mapped when creating new deals, and market pricing benchmarks can be used to offer personalized and contextual pricing. With such information in hand, relationship managers can then easily track client commitments, usage trends, and performance margins in real time instead of retroactively reconciling spreadsheets after the deal ends. This allows them to take corrective action where required and improve renewal negotiations.
• Simulation Capabilities: Traditionally, relationship managers devised fee waivers, volume thresholds or earnings credits adjustments based on educated estimates. But a powerful account analysis tool will allow them to simulate scenarios to view profitability, cross-selling opportunities, and more. They can test multiple scenarios, compare them against competitive benchmarks, understand margin implications immediately, and roll out the best pricing and offers.
• Negotiation Intelligence: RMs can use verified data on customer behavior patterns and transactions to create effective waivers, bundles, tiered structures, earnings credit incentives, and relationship-based pricing. Market benchmarks and rich dashboards can eliminate the opacity that previously undermined trust and slowed negotiations.​

The convergence between account analysis and deal lifecycle management can help create intelligent deals that benefit both the bank and the customer. It can drive transparency and accuracy, and track customer commitments to plug revenue leakage and drive customer satisfaction.

The Strategic Advantage of this Convergence

The convergence can drive some measurable benefits across the organization:

1. Pricing Consistency and Governance: Standardized processes will ensure compliance and consistency across relationship managers, product teams, and customer segments, creating predictable client experiences and reducing the risk of incorrect pricing that impacts margins.​
2. Value-Based Pricing: Pricing decisions will be based on intelligent insights into profitability rather than competitive pressure or intuition. Banks can apply the correct pricing for all products and services, including granular pricing within product families. This will eliminate revenue leakage that occurs when promotions expire unnoticed or services go unbilled.​
3. Tailored Bundling: Data-backed intelligent insights on customer behavior, real usage patterns can help relationship managers create personalized pricing and bundles that deliver value to customers. This strengthens client relationships while protecting profitability through intelligent cross-selling and upselling strategies.​
4. Transparent Negotiations: Negotiating with data to back up the offers builds trust and transparency as both parties can see exactly what is being charged, why, and how it compares to industry benchmarks. This will reduce disputes, shorten sales cycles, and increase close rates.
5. Plugging Revenue Leakage: Relationship managers can align pricing with real usage patterns and automate the flow from deal creation to billing. This will eliminate disconnects that cause unbilled services, misclassified fees, and expired promotional rates.​
6. Custom Deal Configuration: Flexible pricing configurations support dynamic pricing clauses, tiered structures, commitment tracking, and complex hierarchies. This will allow banks to compete for sophisticated corporate relationships without manual workarounds or system limitations.​

Technology Foundation: The Composable Value Layer

Legacy banking systems cannot support the convergence of modernized account analysis and deal lifecycle management. Yet replacing critical core banking systems is a risky and expensive proposition. Instead, banks can opt to deploy powerful microservices-based, cloud-native revenue management systems as middleware. Products like SunTec Xelerate can sit over legacy cores and augment their agility and scalability and integrate account analysis with deal lifecycle management.

SunTec Xelerate can cut through organizational silos to unify data from across systems in real time to ensure quick rollouts. The product ensures that data is accessible, trusted, and actionable across every touchpoint.​ Centralized product and pricing definitions establish a single source of truth across the customer lifecycle, eliminating inconsistencies between what’s sold, what’s executed, and what’s billed.​ The product also centralizes the billing function, allowing operations teams to configure billing logic to deliver accurate, frictionless billing and invoicing to customers.

The Future of Relationship Banking

Banks that treat account analysis as an intelligence engine rather than just a statement generator will be able to win deals, improve profitability, and strengthen customer relationships. The trick lies in combining account analysis data with deal structuring to deliver, transparency, and agility across the deal lifecycle. As market disruption and customer expectations continue to keep revenues under pressure, this convergence can prove to be a significant competitive advantage.