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Financial Services
Industry Dynamics
The financial services industry has entered into an era of unprecedented opportunity. Rapid innovation and increased access to global markets have driven growth and profitability, but have also increased complexity and volatility of business risks. At the same time, financial services are under greater scrutiny than ever before. CRM tools have put customer information on a common platform, permitting an at-a-glance understanding of the relationship across traditionally separate lines of business.
Although customers are becoming more sophisticated, in most sectors the complexity and breadth of offerings is increasing significantly faster. To better educate and influence customers in this more complex environment, many companies have adopted a team sales approach, involving an increasing number of hand-offs and commission programs across functions, divisions, and organizational boundaries. Many firms have grown substantially through acquisitions that expanded their product lines and customer bases. At the same time, the combination of the increased cost-effectiveness of e-commerce and a more tech-savvy customer base have lowered barriers to entry for the industry and supported the rise of the niche competitor. Full-service institutions, weighed down by their broad product lines, are finding they need to extract more value from existing accounts in order to overcome their high cost structures.
Business Challenges
Recent changes within this dynamic industry have been so significant that it no longer rewards the full-service commercial model that employs a standard approach to all markets, but rather demands a more custom approach. While organizations can still leverage size to maximize profit, often quite dissimilar approaches altogether must be developed and implemented to succeed within different business lines or regions.
Marketing must make bold decisions to own specific niches, developing brands and positioning product lines to meet the evolving needs of target customers. Business Development must improve its market scanning capabilities to identify appropriate partners whose product portfolios, market strategies, and customer bases complement the organization’s focus. A new sales model must be adopted that, in addition to assigning direct accountability and rewards for individual production, ensure behaviors that enable effective team and cross-selling. Executives and key operating functions, such as Risk Management, Accounting, and Customer Service, must redefine authority limits, reporting plans, and escalation procedures in order to comply with the most recent regulations and limit unwanted exposure to variability. All functions must define staffing needs and critical competencies to meet the new challenges.
Our Depth of Knowledge
Over the last 20 years we’ve worked across a wide variety of industries understanding changing market dynamics and influence mechanisms, and translating this knowledge into effective strategy and breakthrough results. Our long-term relationships with financial service companies positions us to help our clients understand the complex interactions and needs of all key stakeholders, and to use this perspective to shape responsive strategy and its implementation.
Our engagements with financial service companies encompass a broad range of projects, including the following examples:
- Developing an understanding of market niche opportunities, structuring clear P&L accountabilities, creating a better portfolio decision-making process, and developing competencies to envision and execute a more profitable portfolio.
- Diagnosing internal and external factors impacting the ability to compete and identifying unique product and service value propositions for chosen market segments.
- Developing and implementing recommendations for a more integrated customer interface through guidance on more precise market segmentation, analysis of market needs/opportunities, redesign of critical business processes, and revision of key role definitions.
- Defining and implementing an organization-wide system to develop strong technical and managerial competencies.
- Defining Sales and Marketing infrastructure, roles, process mechanisms, and incentives to drive cross-selling results.
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