Simplification reads well in an annual report. Lower costs, quicker decisions, fewer systems and less friction all signal progress. Inside a global bank, however, the reality is often messier.
According to Corlytics, every change leaves something behind. Retire a system and its data must be moved. Merge two teams and their duties must be redistributed. Outsource a service and someone must still oversee it. Deploy AI and the bank must decide where it can be trusted, where it must be checked and who is accountable for the outcome.
That question of ownership runs through the 2025 annual reports of HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank and UBS, all systemically important financial institutions. While the five differ in business mix and challenges, their shared priorities stand out: stronger returns, greater efficiency, technology investment and tighter risk management.
Deutsche Bank completed a €2.5bn operational efficiency programme, including changes to its German platform and job cuts. Citi focused on modernising technology and reinforcing its risk and controls environment, while UBS pressed on with integrating Credit Suisse.
Decades of acquisitions and piecemeal fixes can leave banks with arrangements nobody would build from scratch. The hard part is understanding what legacy systems actually do before replacing them.
Reconciliations, exception handling, approvals and record keeping still need an owner. Banks should ask whether work has been removed, automated or reassigned, whether the new owner knows it, and whether they have the authority and information to act. Undocumented knowledge, often living in one experienced colleague’s spreadsheet, is easily lost.
AI adds its own decisions. UBS appointed a chief artificial intelligence officer in 2025, JPMorgan linked future success to AI adoption, and HSBC’s board scrutinised GenAI governance. Using AI to find a document carries far lower stakes than using it to inform a credit or compliance decision, and oversight should reflect that.
Supplier risk extends further than many assume. HSBC’s board considered fourth and fifth parties, while Deutsche Bank highlighted the difficulty of moving critical workloads away from major technology platforms. Two seemingly separate services may depend on the same provider, so an initial assessment is only ever a snapshot.
Geopolitics links credit and compliance. Sanctions, tariffs and conflict can affect clients’ ability to repay and introduce new restrictions at once. An alert only becomes useful when the bank knows where it applies, what to do and how to evidence the response.
Citi was especially direct about data quality, warning of continuing challenges in meeting regulatory expectations. Unreliable information breeds workarounds, duplicated checks and inconsistent decisions, making data quality an efficiency issue as much as a control issue.
With capital discipline prominent across the reports, unclear ownership can quickly erode expected savings through rework and remediation. The lesson is that simplification demands greater precision. Boards approving major change should ask who inherits each responsibility, what information they will rely on, and how management will know if something has been missed.
Read the full Corlytics post here.
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