What's in store for Global Banking?

Banking around the world may now be passing through a major cyclical correction, but McKinsey research suggests that the industry’s revenues and profits will double by 2016.
Miklos Dietz, Robert Reibestein, and Cornelius Walter
January 2008
With the midsummer credit crunch taking its toll, 2007 turned into a bleak year for the world’s big financial institutions, and 2008 may not be much better. As executives respond to the immediate pressures, however, they should maintain a clear perspective on the long-term outlook, which in our view is considerably brighter. Despite the current correction, we believe that during the next ten years the growth rate of the global banking industry will exceed that of GDP. Driven by powerful basic trends, such as demographics and the math of wealth accumulation, the industry will likely more than double its revenues and profits over the period.
Just as strikingly, McKinsey research also indicates that the industry’s patterns of growth will be diverse and uneven. Our comprehensive analysis of data since 2000 suggests that banking is one of the global economy’s few large industries that isn’t rapidly converging around a single structure or following the same market dynamics everywhere. Indeed, banking’s revenue performance has varied sharply and unexpectedly within regions, countries, subsectors, and product groups—and will continue to do so.
More than in other major industries, it appears, long-term success in banking hangs on being in the right place at the right time. Over the last ten years, for example, 88 percent of the growth in the revenues of Europe’s 20 largest banks was attributable to market momentum—in other words, competing in or entering territories and market segments that enriched everybody. Moreover, timing is critical. Buying into retail-banking markets across Asia in 2000 would have destroyed value over the next four years, as falling stock market multiples more than offset revenue growth. Buying into them in 2004, however, would have been richly rewarding.
In the text and exhibits that follow, we explore the global banking industry’s rich mosaic and highlight some of the core characteristics identified by our research. Our conclusions offer bank strategists and other senior executives a more detailed understanding of the size and composition of different banking markets, as well as insights into future profit trends.
What’s in store for global banking
Big and getting bigger
The industry with the largest profits . . .
In 2000, the global banking industry’s future looked decidedly downbeat: the Internet was widely expected to compress margins, thus disintermediating or even commoditizing many parts of the business. Banks mostly missed out on the stock market upturn that followed the dot-com debacle, though their empty M&A pipelines were partly to blame.
In retrospect, the gloom proved unwarranted. Global after-tax profits for banks soared to a historic high: from $372 billion in 2000 to $788 billion in 2006, or $672 billion in constant dollars. Along the way, banking became the industry with the highest absolute level of profits (Exhibit 1). In fact, those of US banks alone—$328 billion in 2006—were larger than the combined profits of the retailing, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries around the world. What’s more, in that year the banking industry’s profits per employee were estimated to be 26 times higher than the average of all other industries, and its $2.8 trillion in revenues equaled 6 percent of the global GDP.
. Is set to double its revenues and profits by 2016
The recent stellar performance of the banking industry has, however, proved unsustainable in the short term—not surprising, given its cyclical nature. Corrections inevitably follow peaks, as we have seen from the events of Black Monday (1987) and the dot-com debacle (2001). That appears to be happening now, and the most recent estimates put the profit impact in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
While short-term movements are highly uncertain, the underlying long-term trends, we believe, are encouraging. The industry’s upward path should resume in due course thanks to demographic trends, wealth accumulation patterns, financial innovation, the rapid development of energy markets, and globalization.
Exhibit 2 shows that whatever happens in the next one or two years, global banking profits, as a proportion of total corporate profits, will probably remain at or above their historical high on a ten-year view. Furthermore, our base-case scenario indicates that global banking revenues will grow, on average, by a healthy 7.5 percent a year from 2006 to 2016, compared with an average of 8.0 percent a year from 2000 to 2006 (and 12.6 percent from 2002 to 2006). Although our ten-year projections show annual growth rates for revenues slowing somewhat, they still exceed current forecasts for GDP growth by more than one-half of a percentage point a year over the period. Consequently, we expect the industry to generate $5.7 trillion in revenues and $1.8 trillion in after-tax profits by 2016—more than twice the levels at the end of 2006.
Looking ahead, we project that emerging markets will contribute roughly half of the absolute growth in new banking revenues from 2006 to 2016, while North America and Western Europe will account for 25 and 20 percent, respectively. Russia, we believe, will continue to be one of the fastest-growing large markets in the next few years, and China will maintain its recent accelerated growth rates. In the next tier, certain other Asian countries, especially India, will overtake the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
In the world as a whole, we expect the growth rates of retail assets and credits to converge as a result of the savings of the emerging middle classes of Asia, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. Wholesale banking will probably undergo some restructuring in the next ten years, with investment banking, as well as sales and trading and securities services, providing a larger relative share of the revenues. What’s in store for global banking
Diverse and likely to remain so
The growth of products and countries
Our analysis of the historical data highlights the striking diversity of banking around the world—something we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. Consider the growth patterns of specific countries. We find that revenues in developed ones not only accounted for the bulk of all banking revenues in absolute terms from 2000 to 2006 but also, excluding Japan, grew significantly faster than revenues in the world as a whole, in part thanks to the appreciating euro (Exhibit 3). The “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) were responsible for only 14 percent of the absolute global revenue growth in the six years to 2006, notwithstanding the drumbeat of expectations about growth in emerging markets during that period.
A look at growth rates presents a mixed picture, since Ireland, Russia, and Thailand posted some of the strongest results among individual countries. Interestingly, we found that from 2000 to 2006, banking revenues in Greece grew more rapidly than those in China; India was outpaced by Australia, and Latin America by the United States. At the same time, several markets—including Argentina (at –60 percent), Taiwan, and Turkey—suffered an absolute overall decline in revenues.
Growth also varied markedly by product category. In retail banking, for example, mortgages and asset management delivered double-digit growth from 2000 to 2006 in the world as a whole, while retail brokerage and deposits increased more slowly than inflation did.

What’s in store for global banking
Business mix
The mix of banking business in countries and regions varied significantly, we found, even among those at similar levels of economic development (Exhibit 4). On the one hand, retail banking represented a steady 60 to 70 percent of all revenues in most markets around the world from 2000 to 2006, but wholesale banking accounted for at least half of the industry’s revenues in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. On the other hand, Canada, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, and South Korea rank among the world’s most retail-driven markets.

Further, the mix of businesses within retail banking also varied widely. In the United States, almost two-thirds of retail revenues in 2006 came from mortgages and consumer finance—the two elements of personal financial liabilities—though this will probably change after the crisis of mid-2007. In Western Europe, such products generally accounted for a little over one-third of all revenues. The differences among emerging markets are also noteworthy: Brazil and Ukraine seem to rely on retail lending more than the United States does, while many Asian countries tend to follow the pattern of Western Europe. To take one product, in 2006 the share of credit cards in total retail revenues ranged from 23 percent in Turkey to just over half a percent in Germany; the global average was 7 percent.
Wholesale banking is similarly diverse. In 2006, only 30 percent of US wholesale-banking revenues came from lending to and deposits from large corporations and small and midsize enterprises, 47 percent from corporate banking as a whole. In the United States, investment banking, asset management, and related revenues towered over everything else. In most other countries, however, corporate banking accounted for at least half of all revenue pools in wholesale banking—91 percent in Japan, 88 percent in Turkey, and 74 percent in Latin America, for example. Notably, these ratios have stayed remarkably constant over the past six years. What’s in store for global banking
Growth drivers
Banking may be a leveraged bet on the economy, but the extent of the leverage and the part of the economy on which it is focused vary significantly (Exhibit 5). In addition to economic cycles, banking is a play on sociodemographic patterns and on trends in financial accumulation, both often influenced in turn by culture and government regulation. As became painfully apparent during the summer of 2007, for example, a big jump in household borrowing was largely responsible for the growth of US retail-banking revenues from 2000 to 2006—indeed, it explains 70 percent of the increase.
In Germany, however, household borrowing contributed only 4.7 percent of the total growth of retail revenues from 2000 to 2006; the rest came mainly from new savings and from returns on existing savings. Germany’s banking revenues increased by 4.9 percent in US dollar terms. As in most other continental European countries, a strong currency was a key driver.The impact of demographic and socioeconomic forces was far greater elsewhere. Take India, where population trends and rising salaries played almost as big a part in the growth of retail-banking revenues as savings and lending did. Together, all four drivers more than offset a $4.4 billion decline in deposit margins from 2000 to 2006.
What’s in store for global banking

Capital market multiples
Exhibit 6 calls to mind the fact that the annual growth of a bank’s investment value is its after-tax profit increase adjusted for changes in market multiples. Regional multiples, which often change relative to one another in response to investor sentiment, may add to or detract from an individual institution’s underlying performance.
Such considerations will be significant when banks return in earnest to M&A, as we believe they will. Our research suggests that the growth in banking revenues and profits expected during the next ten years should create $12 trillion in new market capitalization—a huge opportunity for players around the world.
Over the next five years, we expect a new wave of consolidation to speed the emergence of “superbanks,” with more than $500 billion in market capitalization. Today, however, global banking is the least concentrated large industry; the top 20 banks account for less than 40 percent of its global market cap, compared with an average of 67 percent in other key industries. Even the current top European and US banks aren’t guaranteed to achieve superbank status with their existing portfolios.
In our view, the winners will outshine their competitors by developing better insights into the diversity among markets and the nature of the trade-offs between risks and returns. A superior understanding of the fundamentals that drive value should help these banks exploit short-term cyclicality to their long-term advantage.