How Process Simplification can Transform Investment Banking – April 2026
The wave of change impacting corporate and investment banking
In March 2026 McKinsey published an article expressing its view on the transformation change AI-enabled process automation will have on corporate and investment banking. In McKinsey’s view, banks of all sizes need to restructure and streamline operations to adopt AI technological advances. Those institutions adopting AI can modernise structures and future-proof their business models. This requires breaking down business silo’s and restructuring legacy systems. Introducing “zero-touch” processes such as loan origination checks, trade confirmations, collateral calls, and treasury reconciliations can lower operational costs by over 20% whilst significantly enhancing efficiency.
This requires extensive modernisation of legacy systems, addressing technical debt, analysing dependencies and introducing process simplification. Such a review involves looking at process outputs, eliminating redundancies and questioning the value-add of each process step. This is a prerequisite for efficient AI adoption.
This can be achieved by targeted transformations within specific domains and business lines within the framework of a holistic approach to address operational complexity.
A full copy of the McKinsey article can be found here: