The global business environment moves with incredible speed. From technological advances to shifting competitive landscapes, executives are grappling with a wide array of new challenges.

To maintain a competitive edge, companies and their operations are changing fast—and the banking industry is also changing. In today’s environment, the oversimplified, one-size-fits-all, “everywhere” approach is no longer sufficient.

Instead, banks would be well served by developing a deep understanding of the unique needs of each customer. Rather than offering all customers a generic set of fixed, disparate services, banks must treat each organization as if it were their only customer.

Commercial banks that use a genuine “segment of one” approach put their customers first in every aspect of their relationships. Here are a few ways a commercial bank can do this:

1. The innovation imperative

A commercial bank might consider using innovation to make your user experience simple, intuitive, and transformative. This includes providing integrated tools that organize solutions in the way your team thinks about and uses them daily.

In particular, treasury management platforms would benefit by offering both a frictionless experience and customer control. Users could tailor the online and mobile banking platform to their unique business tasks and needs.

Similarly, payment hubs should have customizable functionality to tailor services to the unique needs of a specific customer.

A bank must understand a specific customer’s payment patterns across payment types so we can compare those against aggregated industry and domain data. In this way, customers can receive individualized cash management consulting and advice.

2. A global gateway

The individualized solutions your commercial banking partner delivers need to extend beyond your current footprint.

To help address increasing concerns about the ease of doing business in international markets, your commercial bank should be focused on minimizing organizational and geographical boundaries that restrict growth.

It is also essential that the bank has specialized and local knowledge of specific industries to help your enterprise position itself competitively in the relevant sector within a particular market.

For example, a family-owned boutique winery based in the U.S. was selling its main wine brand to an international food and beverage company. Given our experience advising wine and beverage companies and our strong M&A track record in the industry, we were able to take advantage of our position as a subsidiary of BNP Paribas and tap into our longstanding relationships with strategic and financial acquirers around the world.

Thanks to the connections developed by our One Bank team, we were able to supply global industry insights, and we made the introduction to the ultimate buyer, an Australian-Japanese company.

3. Cybersecurity safeguards

Even the most customized commercial banking relationship is ineffective if not underpinned by a holistic approach to cybersecurity and fraud prevention that safeguards both your enterprise and your bank.

As cybersecurity risks continue to threaten every organization’s competitiveness, growth prospects, and survival, nearly half the CEOs surveyed by KPMG recently said that becoming a victim of a cyberattack is a case of “when,” not “if.” Despite this, the survey revealed that only 51 percent believe they are well prepared for a cyberattack.

To be prepared, your commercial bank should use a risk-based, not rules-based, approach to security that serves you with more flexibility. For example, our customers can configure our treasury management platform to their unique needs and preferences. We offer a range of authentication options—from hard tokens to biometrics—as a toolbox our customers can select from.

In another payment area, our virtual card payment optimization solution applies a unique method to each B2B payment that helps our customers increase controls and provide greater fraud protection while increasing efficiency and reducing expenses.

The future of banking

To genuinely put your company first and serve you as a segment of one, your commercial banking partner can make continual investments in innovation, serve as a seamless gateway to local solutions and market expertise that matches your global footprint, and deliver cutting-edge cybersecurity safeguards.

In the current global environment, it is vital that your organization has every tool it needs to succeed as it confronts rapid change and unavoidable risk in a rapidly changing world.