Corporate banking has evolved into a sophisticated ecosystem where sales managers and relationship managers face unprecedented challenges in balancing competing priorities across deal composition, approvals, tracking, renewals, and ongoing management. The modern banking landscape demands these professionals to navigate intricate trade-offs that often appear mutually exclusive, creating fundamental dilemmas that determine the success or failure of banking relationships and institutional profitability.
The complexity of contemporary deal management extends far beyond traditional transaction-based banking relationships. Modern corporate banking deals encompass consolidated portfolio offerings across multiple lines of business, requiring unprecedented coordination across organizational boundaries, regulatory requirements, and geographic jurisdictions. This evolution has created a new category of challenges that demand both strategic thinking and tactical execution. And the ability to balance competing priorities while delivering value to clients and stakeholders has become a defining characteristic of successful corporate banking relationships.
The Current State of Corporate Banking Deal Management
The corporate banking sector demonstrates significant opportunities for improvement in customer acquisition, contract management, and client retention, with global corporate and commercial banking revenues reaching $2.3 trillion in 2024 and projected 6.4% CAGR growth through 2026.1 & 2 However, performance gaps remain substantial, particularly in relationship manager productivity and digital transformation initiatives.
Corporate banking faces significant customer acquisition challenges, with the majority of relationship managers acquiring fewer than 5 new clients annually.3 This limitation leaves considerable revenue potential untapped.
There are some key dilemmas or challenges facing banks today. They form an interconnected system of challenges that amplify each other’s complexity. And their systemic nature requires holistic management approaches that recognize the trade-offs inherent in each decision. Strategic and analytic functions must be supported by pricing operations, product management, data analytics, and technology to manage these interconnected challenges effectively.
Dilemma One: Winnability vs. Margins – The Profitability Paradox
The tension between winning business and maintaining healthy profit margins has intensified as competitive pressures mount and corporate clients leverage their negotiating power. Modern corporate banking faces a fundamental challenge where over 57% of bank relationship managers resort to ‘mis-selling of products’ due to pressure to meet aggressive sales targets.4
The Competitive Pricing Imperative
Market dynamics force banking professionals to offer increasingly competitive rates to secure and maintain business. The challenge is compounded when dealing with corporate clients who can easily compare terms across multiple financial institutions. Banks must equip sales managers with market intelligence about the rates offered by other banks catering to similar customer segments.
For instance, SunTec Xelerate Deal Management empowers sales managers to view industry benchmark rates for each of the charges and interest products that are being negotiated in a deal. This allows them to fine tune their pricing strategy according to customer segments and align it to market reality.
Sales managers must be able to increase product penetration by bundling additional services and products while negotiating lower prices for one part of the deal. This allows banks to enhance overall profitability as the impact of lower margins is compensated with additional revenue that the bank can make through other offerings in the bundle.
SunTec Xelerate also allows cross-product bundling and a bespoke selection of products and services across lines of business within the bank. This ensures transparency in managing pricing and commitments for complex deals with a diverse product portfolio. It also delivers higher value to the customer who receives competitive pricing.
Margin Protection Strategies
Banks must evolve beyond traditional pricing to reflect true service costs and customer value perceptions. Smarter pricing enables effective margin management by balancing profit and risk, especially as returns decline across multiple product categories.
SunTec Xelerate Deal Management offers powerful simulation capabilities that allow multiple pricing models to be designed and compared. These pricing models factor in the negotiated fees, interest rates, balance commitments, anticipated volume of service transactions, and FX turnover across different product categories bundled in a deal. With the sophisticated simulation tools available in SunTec Xelerate, each of the lines of business can effectively visualize and balance the fees, commitments, and risk, safeguarding margins and enhancing profitability for that deal.
Dilemma Two: Competitive Rates vs. Internal Pricing Controls
The second critical dilemma involves balancing market-responsive pricing with internal pricing governance and risk management controls.
Data-driven Pricing Decisions
The pressure of dynamic pricing has intensified, and customers anticipate pricing that are more aligned to their business needs. SunTec Xelerate empowers bank sales teams with smarter pricing strategies that adapt to customer commitments and product mix, building on their existing market intelligence. SunTec Xelerate Deal Management enables tiered rates and commitments, offering dynamic pricing that aligns service charges with actual customer usage.
It also leverages the historical data of customers such as their past deals or transaction patterns to let sales managers propose better rates during renewals. Access to past data helps them manage the constant tussle between competitive pressures and missing revenue opportunity and profitability.
Internal Control Frameworks
Regulatory requirements and risk management principles demand robust internal controls over pricing decisions. Banks must maintain approval flows for various financial decisions around pricing the deal that include configuration of rules for the users with following access types: Maker/Initiator and Authorizer/Approver. These control frameworks, while essential for risk management, need to be made more intelligent and dynamic to reduce administrative overheads.
SunTec Xelerate empowers product and pricing managers to define the rate thresholds at the time of setting up standard pricing for their products & services. These controls come into play when sales managers are composing deals for those products & services. Sales managers are not only notified when their negotiating rates are breaching the pre-defined limits, but also the subsequent approval workflows for such deals adapt based on these variations. Additional levels of approval are triggered only when the pricing goes beyond certain limits, thus making the approval process more efficient, while managing the risk of underpricing deals.
Dilemma Three: Collaboration vs. Flexibility – Managing the Global-Local Challenge
The third dilemma involves managing deals that span multiple lines of business, jurisdictions, and product categories while maintaining appropriate controls and compliance frameworks. The challenge is further amplified by the way pricing responsibilities are often fragmented across multiple teams including client facing, product, finance, and compliance teams. This silo often leads to erratic pricing and untapped revenue across business lines.
The Perfect Portfolio – Integrating Across the Silos
The need for comprehensive product offerings across Loans, Deposits, Earnings Credit, FX Services, Cash Management, and Payment Services requires unprecedented coordination across departments. Relationship managers often need to juggle dozens of different applications daily, leading to inefficiencies, slower response times, and frustrated clients.
With SunTec Xelerate, multiple offerings across product categories can be proposed through a single, comprehensive deal. This also helps customers get a consolidated view of their relationship with the bank with clarity on products, services and preferential rates offered for each of them. SunTec Xelerate also supports global deals where country-specific subsidiaries can be offered jurisdiction-specific variants of products and services as part of a unified deal with pricing categorized at different levels. This allows each jurisdiction to view their scope of the global deal, along with the consolidated view being made available at the global level.
Dynamics of Compliance and Governance
Banks must enforce strict controls across all business lines and jurisdictions while providing integrated client solutions. Complex transfer pricing between units of a multinational bank demands careful consideration of portfolio mix, asset use, and risk distribution among intra-group entities.
SunTec Xelerate provides role-based access to team members assigned to a deal, which allows multiple sales managers to act on the same deal. The system manages documentation, KYC, and peer and approver feedback captured at every stage of the deal lifecycle for each of the deal members. It also maintains a complete audit of the changes made by various teams.
SunTec Xelerate Deal Management structures multi-jurisdictional deals at global and local levels to address cross-jurisdictional compliance and entity data management obligations. A global deal begins by selecting customer entities across jurisdictions, assigning product catalogs, and identifying relevant bank teams. Each regional team then tailors pricing to local market conditions and simulates revenue for their portion of the deal. This approach ensures both agility in local profitability management and a consolidated global view of the deal.
The internal approvals are also delegated at the jurisdiction level, allowing regional teams to manage review and ensure compliance. This ensures that the end approval and control of the global deal remains with a centralized authority, while regional approvals and transparency at each of the levels are not compromised. The customer is still proposed a unified, global portfolio that gets consolidated after internal approvals of the local deals and a final review at the global level.
Dilemma Four: Long-Term Customer Relationship vs. Factoring Year-over-Year Inflation
Building long-term customer relationships while adapting to inflation and shifting cost structures is challenging, as rising bank expenses often outpace revenue growth from fixed long-term deals.
Relationship Building Imperatives
Banks need deal performance and accurate tracking of past commitments for renewing or extending deals with minimal overheads and optimal pricing for the subsequent iterations.
SunTec Xelerate ensures accurate deal reviews and commitment tracking and provides data-driven insights to relationship managers at the time of renewals. Banks can recommend not just the best rates during renewals but also advise customers on projections on transaction values based on past performance. This consultative approach for renewing deals backed by billing data and commitment metrics becomes a strong tool for elevating a bank as a trusted partner to the customer.
Balancing Inflation and Cost Management Pressures
Customer retention is a key priority for relationship managers, and multi-year deals help sustain relationships without yearly renegotiations. SunTec Xelerate enables banks to structure multi-year agreements with flexible commitments and dynamic pricing that accommodates annual reviews.
SunTec Xelerate Deal Management helps banks build strategies that factor in annual service fee increases and interest rate trends, while supporting long-term customer loyalty. This is made possible by weaving in pricing adjustments for different periods within the deal and introducing a year-on-year increment that is transparently made available to customers as part of the deal contract. This negotiation lets the sales manager predict future revenue and year-wise profitability that considers dynamic prices, internal costs, as well as projected yearly commitments.
Dilemma Five: Deal Quality vs. Turnaround Time – The Agility-Quality Trade-off
Modern corporate clients expect rapid turnaround times while requesting a value-driven proposal from the bank. But this may become a race against time for the bank as they need to ensure the right product fitment, understanding customer projections, managing risk, and maximizing profitability.
The Need for Speed – Meeting Customer Expectations
Corporate clients expect rapid turnaround times for proposals and approvals. But submission of a bespoke deal involves multiple discussions to understand client requirements, products, bundle fitment, price negotiations, profitability simulations, and internal approvals across bank teams. SunTec Xelerate streamlines the deal composition by recommending eligible products, bundles, and value-added services based on the customer profile. Rate recommendations and market intelligence data further reduce the time to arrive at the best possible rates. Our deal management product helps sales managers to simulate multiple pricing models with differing commitments. This reduces the iterations between makers and checkers, as different options can be evaluated and compared with each other to arrive at the most optimal model for customers.
SunTec Xelerate also offers an intelligent approval workflow, which can be configured for dynamic, parallel or sequential workflows based on variations between proposed rates and standard rates, profitability metrics, and risk assessment. This coupled with timely notifications and alerts to approvers significantly reduces the time between internal approvals and customer submission. An actionable deal cockpit for makers and checkers also highlights the deals based on date of submission, upcoming renewals, thus ensuring that timely actions are taken on critical deliverables.
The “House View” on Quality and Risk
Thorough deal analysis and compliance verification requires time, attention to detail, and focus on regulatory requirements. This creates inherent tension between speed and thoroughness in deal processing.
SunTec Xelerate uses data-driven automation and business processes. It integrates product catalogs, bundles and offers, market intelligence, rate recommendations, generation of offer letters, pricing, invoicing, implementation, monitoring, and renewals to enhance transparency, manual errors, and reconciliation across systems. This reduces risks and improves quality across the deal lifecycle.
Technological Solution and Future Direction
AI-powered pricing strategies enable banks to enhance transparency, strengthen client retention, and minimize revenue leakage—all while equipping relationship managers with data-driven insights at the point of sale. Modern solutions emphasize automated deal execution from quote to cash, digitizing the entire lifecycle of negotiated pricing to remove handoffs, enforce compliance, and prevent revenue leakage. They enable banks to configure, approve, and roll out complex deals through structured workflows with full audit trails, while seamlessly connecting negotiated terms to billing for precise, automated invoicing. By implementing AI, banks can curb revenue leakage by spotting discrepancies in discount requests, thereby ensuring alignment with overall strategic objectives.
The current environment presents both significant challenges and opportunities for innovation. While corporate banking profitability is at the lower end, the integration of advanced technologies and sophisticated management approaches offers pathways to improve performance. These dilemmas will likely intensify in the years to come, making the development of effective deal management approaches increasingly critical. SunTec Xelerate Deal Management helps banks’ balance short-term pressures with long-term goals by ensuring transparency, agility, and governance throughout the deal lifecycle.
