Banks have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on technology over the past decade, yet many still construct complex customer deals, much as they did 20 years ago: through spreadsheets, email trails, and the heroics of overworked relationship managers. A corporate treasurer can configure a cloud instance in seconds, but may wait days, or weeks, for a lending or cash-management proposal to inch its way through internal processes.
The irony is that this is happening just as AI moves from the lab to the frontline. Banks are busy launching chatbots, piloting “copilots” for staff, and training models to detect fraud or recommend the next best product. But the core act of deal construction, the place where economics, risk, and relationships really meet, often remains curiously untouched. AI is pointed at the edges of the relationship rather than now when the deal itself is designed.
“Silicon Valley is coming,” Jamie Dimon once warned his peers. The uncomfortable truth is that, inside many banks, the future has already arrived at the channel, while the way the institution assembles value for its customers remains stubbornly analogue.
“Build Your Own Deal” (BYOD) is a response to that gap. It is not a gimmicky front-end toy. It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about how banks, relationship managers, and customers assemble value together, anchored in composable architecture and open standards such as those promoted by BIAN1 , and powered by data and AI. Done well, it is the democratization of deal-making: decision-making power pushed closer to where the relationship actually lives, in the hands of the RM and the customer, rather than trapped in central product committees and opaque approval chains.
Just as political systems have, over time, shifted from decisions taken in closed salons to wider participation and accountability, banking is now being nudged from a world of centralized product edicts to one where customers and front-line bankers have meaningful say in how a deal is constructed.
The End of the Product Push
For decades banks have operated with a sales-driven, product-push mindset. Products are pre-packaged. Campaigns are hurled at segments. Relationship managers are expected to “make the numbers” by persuading clients to accept what is on offer. Approval workflows are largely manual, and pricing discretion lives in inboxes, spreadsheets, and unwritten norms.
That model is creaking. Corporate treasurers, SME founders, and affluent retail customers no longer benchmark their banking experience solely against rival banks. They compare it with digital-native platforms that allow them to experiment, simulate, compare, and commit in their own time. Waiting for an RM to “get back with a revised proposal” feels increasingly anachronistic, like waiting for a central planning committee to decide whether one may change phone tariffs.
The emerging paradigm reverses the logic. Instead of a product-push, RM-dependent, rigid construct, the bank moves towards customer-led configuration. The client defines the contours of the deal including limits, tenors, collateral structures, service combinations, channels, service levels. The RM guides this process rather than fighting it. The bank’s systems assemble the relevant building blocks in real time. Intelligent pricing and risk engines calculate what is feasible, and at what price, within policies and limits. Approvals become the exception, not the routine.
In this world, the RM is no longer a mere messenger between the customer and an invisible “back office”. They are an empowered representative, equipped with transparent levers and real-time insight. The customer is no longer a passive recipient of a standard package; they become a co-author of their own arrangement. The real work of assembling the deal happens in software, but the agency shifts decisively towards the two people who matter most: the banker and the client across the table.
From Bundles to Building Blocks
For BYOD to work, banks must stop thinking in terms of monolithic products and start thinking in terms of service domains – modular capabilities that can be orchestrated into a tailored arrangement for each customer.
This is where industry standards and frameworks are pivotal. They break banking into discrete, interoperable components such as directories of products, customer-eligibility checks, product-matching engines, discount and special-pricing logic, customer-offer generation, sales-agreement management, risk assessment, document services and more. Each domain does one thing well and exposes standardized interactions.
A BYOD journey traverses these domains in a disciplined way. A customer or RM begins by exploring what is possible, based on entitlements and profile. Behind the scenes, eligibility and product-directory functions determine what can be offered. Matching services surface suitable combinations. Pricing components evaluate commercial levers. Customer-offer and agreement domains formalize the proposition into a structured deal.
Seen through this lens, a “deal” ceases to be an ad hoc bundle negotiated in a meeting room and frozen in a PDF. It becomes a composed artefact – a set of agreements, prices, limits, and obligations stitched together across standard domains. That composability is what allows banks to move from a handful of static packages to mass-customized, segment-of-one propositions without drowning in operational complexity.
The contrast with the old world is stark. In many institutions today, changing a small element of a corporate package, say, adjusting the fee structure on cash management, can trigger manual rework across systems and teams. In a domain-driven, BYOD world, the same change is a configuration, not a mini-project. The architecture becomes the quiet constitution underpinning this new deal democracy.
Guardrails, Not Heroics
The notion of letting customers “build their own deal” can sound like a loss of control. Regulators worry about misselling. Risk functions fear unbounded discounting. Finance teams fret about revenue leakage. These anxieties are understandable in a world where deals are shaped by exception and enforced by manual heroics.
BYOD, done properly, does the opposite. It embeds control into the fabric of the system.
Eligibility rules are enforced before options are shown. Risk assessments run automatically as configurations change. Pricing engines incorporate hurdle rates, transfer-pricing rules, and relationship-level economics, ensuring that apparently generous offers still make financial sense in aggregate. Regulatory and compliance components check that what is being proposed satisfies relevant jurisdictional constraints.
AI plays a twin role. On one side, it improves the relevance of recommendations, surfacing product combinations, fee structures or service levels that resonate with the customer’s historic behavior and with peer benchmarks. On the other, it acts as a guardian, spotting unusual combinations, hidden concentrations or configurations that may look attractive commercially but pose operational or reputational risk.
The democratization here is not chaos; it is rule-bound empowerment. In political terms, it is closer to constitutional democracy than to noisy street protest.
Beyond the Corporate Boardroom
It is tempting to view BYOD as a corporate-banking innovation: something for large treasuries negotiating complex cash-management and lending packages. That is certainly a fertile starting point, where the value of speed, transparency, and customization is evident and where RMs are heavily involved today.
But the same logic applies across segments. For SMEs, which often fall into a no-man’s land between highly tailored corporate service and commoditized retail products, BYOD can be transformative. A founder could configure their own mix of working-capital lines, payment services, collections, foreign exchange, and digital tools, with the platform dynamically adjusting conditions as their financials evolve. The banker becomes a guide in this process, not a gatekeeper.
In retail banking, BYOD can underpin “lifestyle deals”: a mortgage that flexes with saving behavior; a bundle of accounts, cards, and subscriptions tuned to a customer’s spending pattern; a family arrangement that recognizes shared goals. The essence is not novelty for its own sake but enabling customers to exercise meaningful choices within a curated and controlled set of possibilities.
Designing BYOD capabilities to be segment-agnostic or reusing the same service domains and orchestration patterns across corporate, SME and retail, allows banks to amortize architectural investment while tailoring front-end experiences for different audiences. The underlying machine is common; the faces it wears are not.
Why Now, and Why Standards Matter
Banks spend more than $600 billion annually on technology, but productivity remains stubbornly low2. One reason is that much of this spending reinforces existing silos: shiny channels on top of old cores, isolated pricing tools, bespoke workflows for each business line.
BYOD, especially when grounded in industry frameworks and models, offers a way out of this trap. It forces banks to confront simple but uncomfortable questions. What are the canonical services we provide? How do they interact? Which of them are genuinely differentiating, and which should simply conform to industry standards?
Instead of wiring yet another tactical tool into an already tangled landscape, banks design for reuse: the same eligibility assessment serving multiple journeys; the same discount-pricing components underpinning retail campaigns and corporate deal-building; the same customer-offer functions generating consistent contracts regardless of channel.
Standards matter because they turn experiments into patterns. When service domains are defined and named in a common language, vendors, banks, and partners can collaborate more easily. Pilots in one institution can inform reference architectures in another. Innovations such as BYOD cease to be bespoke science projects and become repeatable design patterns for the industry.
From Pilots to the New Normal
For most banks, BYOD will not arrive with a big-bang transformation and a triumphant press release. It will start with targeted pilots: a deal-builder for a specific corporate segment; a self-service configuration tool for a subset of SME products; a limited-scope “configure your relationship” experience for premium retail customers.
These pilots will raise practical questions. How much choice is constructive rather than confusing? At what point does the RM intervene? How does one explain AI-driven pricing in language customers trust? What does “fairness” mean when the machine is assembling the deal?
Industry standards and the broader ecosystem of banking-technology providers have an important role in accelerating these experiments. Together, they can refine which service domains are essential for BYOD, how they should interact and what good looks like in terms of performance, resilience, and auditability. They can also codify lessons learned into archetypes and blueprints that others can adopt.
The direction of travel, though, is clear. As banking becomes more embedded, more invisible, and more intertwined with customers’ daily lives, the value will lie less in the products banks manufacture and more in the configurations they enable. “Bank-sold” bundles will give way to “customer-built” deals that reflect the specific risk, opportunity, and preference profile of each relationship—without sacrificing control.
In that sense, BYOD is not a gadget perched on top of existing banking. It is a practical route to a more democratic industry: one in which the power to compose value moves closer to the RM and the customer, and in which composable architecture and open standards quietly do the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
