Are you missing out on a prime opportunity?

Deutsche, one of the most active in the area in foreign exchange, has belatedly established a fixed-income offering. However, while it is behind some of its main rivals, the move to integrate its FX and fixed-income prime brokerage operations means the bank has the potential to leapfrog the competition.

While there is a certain amount of collaboration between equity, fixed income and FX prime brokerage at a number of banks, there is also a lack of co-ordination. At some banks this comes as a result of different PB operations coming from different acquisitions. There is also likely to be an element of the bunker mentality, with the equities team ignoring what is going on in FX and fixed income.

This approach inevitably leads to missed opportunities. One client who may be putting millions through the equity silo may be entirely unaware that they can get an excellent deal for their FX flow.

However, it would be easy to overstate the case for integration. Personnel at banks' client companies will often only work on one asset class. Banks and their customers benefit from staff who have detailed knowledge about a particular asset class.

There are also regulatory issues affecting how much separate asset class profit and loss accounts can be integrated into a single pool.

The huge potential costs in terms of both time and money that integrating different systems from different businesses can incur must also be considered. It may be hard to justify to a finance director that it is worth spending millions now for some vague prediction of potential future returns.

However, the benefits of working towards a single, cross-asset prime brokerage operation should not be underestimated. Those leading the pack today could reap extensive benefits from being tomorrow's top dog.

Co-ordination in prime brokerage needs to be duplicated more generally between different product lines at banks. FX desks need to learn from what is going on at fixed income and equity desks. Banks would benefit from more movement of staff between desks, and individuals would do their career prospects no harm by diversifying their knowledge base.