Why Swiss Corporate Banks Don't Differentiate Their Pricing by Segment and What It Costs Them

Every corporate bank knows this conversation: a business client asks for better terms, the relationship manager gives in, and the margin quietly shrinks. What almost never happens is a structured analysis of whether this client is actually price sensitive or whether they ask for better terms simply because no one has ever said no.

An EY analysis (2023) shows that 35% of B2B banking revenue is negotiated without structured price defense. In other words, a third of all corporate client revenue depends on whether the relationship manager has backbone that day. That is not a pricing model. That is chance with a banking license.

Uniform Pricing Is Not a Fairness Principle but a Structural Flaw

For years, UBS and Credit Suisse offered uniform pricing in their corporate segment. The logic sounds reasonable: equal treatment, simplicity, no internal conflicts. The problem is that clients with high switching costs and strong bank dependency pay the same prices as clients who could move to a competitor tomorrow. A company with three banking relationships that actively compares terms gets the same price as the mid-sized business that has been loyal for 15 years and never negotiates.

ING Business Banking in the Netherlands addressed this flaw systematically. Through segmented packages, differentiated by company size, product usage and likelihood to switch, ING increased its average revenue per user (ARPU) by 12%. Not through higher prices for everyone, but through more precise prices for the right segments.

Why Swiss Banks Have More Data Than Any Other Industry and Still Don’t Use It

This is the real paradox: no industry knows its clients as well as banking. Banks see payment flows, balance sheet figures, liquidity reserves, investment patterns and credit histories. In theory, this data allows for more precise client segmentation than in any other B2B industry.

In practice, this data is rarely used for price differentiation. The reasons are structural. Pricing authority lies with the relationship manager, not with a central pricing function. Granting discounts carries no penalty in the incentive system. And the systems that hold client data are rarely connected to the systems that set prices.

The result: banks that know more than any other industry price like companies with no client data at all.

The First Step: Not a New Pricing Tool, but a Segmentation Model

The typical response to this problem is the wrong one. Many banks invest in pricing software before they understand which criteria their clients should be segmented by in the first place.

The right order is the reverse:

Step 1: Quantify willingness to pay by segment. Which client groups are truly price sensitive? Which are loyal and respond more to service than to price? Most banks never answer this question systematically.

Step 2: Product bundles instead of single product price negotiations. Banks that build packages instead of negotiating individual products shift the conversation away from price. When a client receives a package combining a liquidity solution, trade finance and digital banking access, they negotiate on overall value, not on the interest rate of a single product.

Step 3: Build price defense skills in relationship management. Without training and clear guidelines, relationship managers reach for discounts by reflex. A structured value story for each segment is the foundation for defending prices without internal escalation.

What Banks Risk by Sticking With Uniform Pricing

The risk is not just margin erosion but a structural competitive disadvantage. Neobanks such as Qonto (France) and Penta (Germany) differentiate their business client packages by needs and usage behavior from day one. They don’t win primarily on price. They win because their offering is clearly tailored to specific client segments.

Established banks that continue to work with undifferentiated price lists are not losing the pricing negotiation. They are losing touch with segmentation reality: they no longer know which clients carry which value and what price they could bear.

Price differentiation in corporate banking is not a question of courage. It is a question of methodology. Banks that introduce segmentation models and quantify willingness to pay by client type and product bundle win back margins they give away quietly every day.

CustomersX develops segmentation and pricing models for financial institutions, based on its own research and years of experience in financial services. Get in touch or write to [email protected].

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