Financial Institutions

Change is constant in Financial Services. What differentiates today's environment from that of the last five years is the velocity and scope of this change. Markets have become global and seamlessly interlinked. Decisions impact multiple geographies, reporting lines, and systems. And, almost every part of the industry is under regulatory scrutiny that promises seismic shifts in business models and balance sheets. In this challenging environment, companies need to move as nimbly as a Ferrari while driving an aircraft carrier.

We partner with clients to help them successfully navigate this dichotomy. We accomplish this by taking a rational, data driven approach to support fact based decision making. And, by addressing the organisational issues-culture, structure, incentives-that can impede the rapid deployment of these decisions.

We focus on three industry sectors:

Long-term savings including Wealth Management, Asset Management, Life and Pensions, Bancassurance, and IFA distribution
Retail banking including both sides of the balance sheet as well as multi-channel distribution.
Cards and payments including credit, debit, pre-paid, ATM's, interchange management, ACH, and corporate payments.

Our work with clients in each of these industry sectors encompasses the six areas that are on the top of every senior manager's agenda:

Top-Line Revenue Growth: Geographic expansion - countries, products, entry strategies and impact on ROI/ROE; acquisitions and JV/partnerships, including due diligence and PMI. New businesses and product lines, focusing on competitive strategy (where to play, how to win) and blueprinting across the value chain (marketing, operations, systems, organisation structure, risk management).
Marketing Strategy and Tactics: Customer segmentation; value proposition design; channel strategy and tactics; the intermediary and customer Buying Process, which includes mapping the key drivers of net sales and identifying opportunities to rationalise product lines, optimise sales effectiveness, improve front office processes, and refocus marketing and sales budgets.
Operational Effectiveness: Process mapping and identification of opportunities to enhance service/revenue; new product development and time to market; decisions on outsourcing/insourcing/ centralisation of core functions, including support in vendor selection/implementation; benchmarking; business process re-engineering; strategic sourcing to reduce purchasing costs.
Initiatives Planning, Implementation and Tracking: Aligned to revenue, margin, and ROE targets; economic model development and sensitivity analysis to guide initiatives prioritisation; stakeholder alignment; stakeholder alignment and management to address roadblocks; recommendation of project structures, including hot housing; development of dashboards and tracking processes.
Regulatory Response: Combination of analysis and workshops to sharpen focus on issues most critical to revenues and strategy and to balance management attention between tactical compliance and strategic response initiatives; scenario planning, including consumer and competitive response; financial modelling; recommendation and implementation of short, mid, and long term defensive and offensive projects.

Our areas of specialisation include: cards, long-term savings-including pensions, funds, and bancassurance--wealth management, and retail banking. AT Kearney has teams in all major financial hubs, enabling us to work across multiple geographies. Almost all of our projects span several countries and include international teams.
Pre-deal due diligence and post merger integration: Strategic review and candidate screening. Option quantification. Identification of deal value creation levers. Collaboration with investment bankers and legal counsel. PMO, including planning and implementation of "First 100 Day Programmes" and on-going PMI.

HOW WE ARE DIFFERENT

Financial services clients are experts in their industry sectors. Many also count former consultants among their ranks. This requires a different consulting style and offer to add value. We accomplish this by coupling analytical work with a commitment to helping clients implement recommendations. What we find is that our clients frequently need a catalyst who can synthesise thinking, facilitate the decision making process, and cut through the organisational issues that impede taking action.

We:

Work with client joint team members to ensure ownership of data, models, and recommendations
Stick around for the implementation of recommendations
Ensure active stakeholder alignment, input, and feedback throughout the course of a project
Employ a workshop based, iterative approach that actively engages all decision makers
Deploy more experienced consultants-Our typical consultant profile is older than the industry average and we do not deploy teams of recent graduates. Many of our team members have worked for multiple years within the financial services industry and hence have a strong, practical working knowledge of what it takes to push through new strategies and programmes. This approach ensures that clients' budgets don't pay to teach our consultants their business.

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