IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Corporate Banking 2025 Predictions

This IDC Financial Insights FutureScape presents the top 10 predictions for the corporate banking industry."AI and blockchain will revolutionize corporate banking by the end of the decade, transforming loan management, trade finance, and risk assessment, while enabling banks and customers to navigate and prepare for ongoing economic volatility and regulatory shifts," said Tom Zink, senior research director, IDC Financial Insights.

IDC FutureScape Figure

Executive Summary

IDC FutureScape Predictions

• Summary of External Drivers
• Predictions: Impact on Technology Buyers
  • Prediction 1: By 2025, commercial real estate lenders will require enhanced automated collateral and covenant management solutions due to volatility in commercial property valuations.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 2: By 2026, due to the wider adoption of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR), corporate banks will be able to reduce their trade finance operational costs by 15%.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 3: By 2026, under digital operational resilience regulations, banks must undertake stricter control on third-party management, thus investments in procurement processes automation will grow 30%.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 4: Responding to the dire need to automate and enhance its counterparty credit assessment process, by 2028, 50% of large enterprises will adopt generative AI to manage counterparty risk.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 5: Modern virtual accounts are a catalyst for corporate banking-as-a-service (BaaS), enabling innovative banks to build BaaS capabilities and boost revenue per customer by 15%-25% in 2025.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 6: As B2B and B2C payments become more electronic and more complex, embedded payment offerings from corporate application ISVs will capture 20% of corporate payment transaction volume by 2027.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 7: 100% of bulge bracket investment banks will provision blockchain-enabled tokenized asset infrastructure platform services to their clients by 2027.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 8: By 2028, 40% of the global trade will be in currencies other than U.S. dollars, driven largely by increased trade in other currencies and the flow of trade in CBDCs.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 9: Responding to demand for application users, by 2028, 70% of financial applications will feature financial services (payments, lending, financing, etc.) embedded within the workflow.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance
  • Prediction 10: By 2029, 75% of green bond issuance will utilize DLT to enable real-time pricing transparency and automated ESG compliance reporting, reducing manual management tasks and enhancing investor confidence.
    • Associated Drivers
    • IT Impact
    • Business Impact
    • Guidance

Advice for Technology Buyers

External Drivers: Detail

• AI-Driven Business Models - Moving From AI Experimentation to Monetization
• The Drive to Automate - Toward a Data-Driven Future
• Future Proofing Against Environmental Risks - ESG Operationalization and Risk Management
• Geoeconomic Reordering - Rethinking Globalization, Supply Chains, and Macroeconomic Challenges
• Responsible and Human-Centric Technology - Ethics in the Enterprise
• Battling Against Technical Debt - Overcoming Hurdles to IT Modernization
• Customer Experience Squared - Consumer and Citizen Expectations for Digital Services

Learn More

• Related Research