Banks stake their future on structured products e-platforms

The connection of electronic pricing and trading engines between investment banks and private banking clients has increased dramatically during the past couple of years as sophisticated new systems have come on stream. What is the competitive advantage of this process industrialisation? And how does it fit in against the overall balance of closed versus open architecture at private banks? Harry Thompson reports

Around two years ago, most dealers started to ready automatic price-quoting systems, based on emails, that enabled private banks to get prices for certain regularly used products at the touch of a button. A few years earlier, UBS even took the step of developing a full click-and-trade system that enabled the relationship managers at its private bank to browse products and underlyings and experiment with different calibrations of pricing and payoff.

Now, during the post-crisis lull, banks are