Abstract:

Corporate banking in Germany is going to go through some important changes: 1. Corporations will be less loyal to banks: the lead bank concept will be gradually lose its importance; 2. Profit margins in corporate banking will decline even further because of increased competition among banks and also because large multinationals demand to be treated like banks; 3. Banks will develop more innovative financial instruments because they have to. Standardised solutions, although being less cost-intensive, will not guarantee survival; 4. Marketing approaches will become more important: the identification of customer requirements and the supervision of the conduct of bank corporation communication systems via continuous market research will be a must for banks (a development about which market researchers - for obvious reasons - are not unhappy); 5. The importance of qualified account officers will be even larger than today, despite the labour saving development of efficient technological systems; 6. Electronic banking will eventually penetrate German corporate banking. It will, however, not influence corporations' decisions as to the selection of banks to which they allocate their business.