Spokeswomen for Pimco and BlackRock declined to comment on the bond allocations the firms receive.

Getting allocations at the point of sale can make the difference between a good year or a bad one for a money manager.

You also don’t want to be the fund that’s lumbered with a dud. Take Adidas AG: when the sporting-goods maker last sold bonds in 2014, small investors were left on the hook because there wasn’t enough interest from bigger firms, according to Anthony Peters, a strategist who has observed the market for more than 30 years. The notes slid about two cents on the euro in initial trading.

Salespeople
Some of the digital systems threaten to take over salespeople’s most time-consuming tasks: informing investors of upcoming offerings, taking their orders and telling them their allocations.

By performing the most mundane jobs, digitization could free up people for more complex tasks like discussing trading strategies, advocates say. It could also mean job cuts for cost-conscious employers. The 12 largest investment banks already reduced their global credit salesforce by 25 percent in about five years through mid-2017 to 1,500 people, according to analytics provider Coalition Development Ltd.

“Why have a sales guy if you can just order bonds directly on a new issue?” said Tim Hall, global head of debt capital markets at Credit Agricole SA for nine years until 2016.

Treasurers
Corporate borrowers are already innovating to cut costs. Some are using blockchain technology to sell a cross between bonds and loans known as Schuldschein. And while some still depend on banks’ for their advice and extra services, others want to cut down on fees by using electronic auctions instead of syndicating notes.

Auctions are regularly used in the government bond market, especially so-called Dutch auctions where investors submit orders to buy through primary dealers and the borrower’s treasury team fills orders starting with the highest prices first. The borrower doesn’t generally pay any bank fees.

Syndicate Desks
The largest bond arrangers have the most to lose if frequent borrowers increasingly opt for electronic auctions, shrinking the role of the syndicate managers—described in Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker” as “omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous”.

“We are keeping a wary eye on what this could mean for revenue generation going forward,” Marc Tempelman, former vice chairman of Global Capital Markets at Bank of America said at a conference in Luxembourg last year.