Financial Services

We work with financial services clients to generate long-term, sustainable growth.

The Marketing & Distribution Practice works with consumer financial services organizations including life insurance and retirement companies, property and casualty insurers, retail banks, and consumer finance and mortgage lenders to generate sustainable long-term growth. We integrate our knowledge of business strategy, organizational performance leadership, and operations excellence to serve clients through a comprehensive range of service lines on topics related to marketing and distribution.

• Marketing spend optimization

We help clients take a holistic view of how they market their products and services, using a series of proven techniques to achieve significantly higher performance, from awareness to usage and consumer loyalty. By using both effectiveness and efficiency techniques, clients improve performance in their marketing investments, often reducing resources consumed by marketing activities.

• Distribution imperatives

Financial services firms must balance the need to reduce distribution costs, retain clients, retain advisers, and stimulate revenue. Our proprietary research on the behaviors and attitudes of both customers and advisers helps life insurers, wealth managers, and other financial firms address these multiple challenges.

• Digital marketing

With increasing numbers of consumers selecting and interacting with financial services providers online, we partner with firms to refine their approach to digital marketing. Our work is based on primary research into customer needs and preferences.

• Customer experience

We help clients evaluate current and potential service delivery models across channels, identify opportunities to create better experiences for their customers, and show how this enhanced experience can translate into economic value. Our proprietary approach and data on business and segment-specific consumer behavior enable clients to prioritize investments and optimize marketing spend.

• Advisory sales force productivity

We work with clients to achieve and sustain revenue growth by improving the productivity of their advisory sales forces. We focus on understanding producer mind-sets and barriers to sales at various career stages, and we have proprietary research on several aspects of distribution, including meeting the needs of consumers as they prepare for and enter retirement. We have distinctive capabilities in sales-management, including recruiting, teams, training, compensation, and the roles played by two critical entities: the home office and front-line managers..

We help financial services firms navigate operations and IT challenges from the back office to the front line.

In an era of rapid technological change, we offer a range of services to help financial services firms improve business performance, reduce operational risk and develop compelling value propositions for their customers. Our clients include leading banks, insurers, asset managers and payments players in all major markets. Our global network of practitioners and dedicated experts augment their work with a robust proprietary knowledge base comprised of research, benchmarks and tools.

We focus with clients on IT effectiveness and strategy; improving back-office performance; smart-sourcing; risk management; sales and marketing effectiveness; and large-scale program management. Our value proposition is concentrated on formulating solutions that create business value, both as architects of innovative solutions and as implementation co-managers.

We help leaders instill an impact-focused mind-set across their organization.

Most executives know intuitively what academic research has consistently confirmed: organizational factors are powerful drivers of strong, sustained business performance. Winning companies must periodically transform themselves to get— and stay— on top.

The Organization Practice helps clients across the financial services industry make the changes necessary to achieve and sustain success. We firmly believe that organizational factors are powerful drivers of strong, long-term business performance.

We serve financial services firms in several important areas:

• Leadership

We work with clients to improve leadership behaviors over a relatively short period of time. We build alignment during the leadership journey and catalyze leadership teams to adopt a dynamic and impact-focused mind-set.

• Performance transformation

Transformation is fundamental change that penetrates deep into an institution’s heart and mind and yields a significantly higher level of business performance and health. To drive change in short- and long-term performance, we help financial institutions make sustainable shifts in ambition, collective self-beliefs, behaviors, culture, capabilities, systems, and processes.

• Organizational design

Recognizing that changing the structure of an organization is highly disruptive, we work with clients on design change only if the benefits are significant. We begin by diagnosing the potential value of a redesign and then focus on the elements that will most effectively drive performance and health. These may include defining an organization archetype, designing a formal management structure and optimal spans of control, maximizing the value of the corporate center and cross-business functions, developing performance-management systems, defining the appropriate level of outsourcing, developing an internal knowledge marketplace, and galvanizing social networks.

• Merger management and integration

We help clients create a combined company postmerger with higher performance and greater momentum than that of either of the premerger companies.

We help payments players capture opportunities in a fast-changing environment.

The evolution of the payments industry continues to be driven by changes in technology and customer behavior. We work with clients to help them keep pace and capture the opportunities inherent in this shifting landscape. Our network of partners across the globe serves banks, credit card companies, transaction processors, payments cooperatives, technology firms, and non-banks on issues ranging from overall payments strategy and implications to retail payments services, cash management, and payments technology.

We bring a breadth of expertise to our work with clients, starting at the top with integrated cross-institution payments strategy and developing responses to the rapidly changing payments landscape. On the corporate payments side, our work covers small-business payments services, corporate cash management, and interbank payments services; in retail we support clients on issues with credit and debit cards, ATMs, retail demand-deposit-accounts, and mobile payments. Our work on processing, outsourcing, and infrastructure management covers card processing and acquiring, electronic funds transfer/automated clearing house processing, ATM driving and switching, and item processing.

We help financial services clients achieve extraordinary risk-adjusted performance.

Facing extreme volatility in financial and commodity markets, more and more of our clients are realizing that effective, risk-informed strategy can offer a major source of competitive advantage. We take a holistic approach to risk issues, combining deep industry insight and strategic skills with a structured risk-management approach, proven methodologies focused on true transformation, analytical tools, and practical implementation.

The Risk and Regulation Practice comprises a global community of experts who specialize in helping companies create value in a turbulent world. Our partners, consultants and large analytics staff advise the world’s largest banks. We also collaborate with expert external advisers, who bring to bear decades of industry, regulatory, and academic experience.

Our four key areas of expertise are enterprise risk management and risk culture, credit risk, market and trading risk, and risk and regulation.

• Enterprise Risk Management and Risk Culture

We help clients develop risk-management capabilities to support their strategic priorities, so they can protect the value of the company while growing the business profitably. Our integrated perspective on enterprise-wide risk enables us to support not only the chief risk officer (CRO) or CFO but the entire management team, including the CEO and other business leaders.

• Credit Risk

We help financial institutions manage risk along the entire credit value chain, addressing challenges and opportunities related to origination and underwriting, credit-portfolio management, loss mitigation, credit modeling and advanced analytics. In the last years, we have completed projects that maximized value and mitigated losses in our clients’ credit portfolios.

• Risk and Regulation

We work with banks, insurers, regulators, and governments to quantify and address the operational and strategic impact of regulatory changes as well as to prepare for the implementation of new regulation.

• Market and Trading Risk

We help companies create and preserve value by providing advice and analytics on managing market-risk exposures, selecting hedging strategies, and capturing market and trading opportunities.

We help financial services firms worldwide define, build, and maintain winning strategies.

Our network of strategists works with banks, insurers, asset managers and payments companies to help define, build and maintain winning business portfolios, align actions with long-term objectives, and balance risks.

We work with clients on issues relevant to the enterprise-wide management of their business, such as growth, portfolio mix, business unit strategy, the impact of global trends and the management of government stakeholders. Our partners and experts are well-versed in both top-down strategic approaches and in the innovation needed to compete in a global economy marked by disruptive technology and emerging markets.

Our corporate finance experts are the pre-eminent independent advisers on finance and value creation. We work with chief financial officers on finance organization, portfolio strategy and major investment decisions; linking corporate strategy to capital markets performance; investor communications; ensuring that M&A and other transactions are consistent with overall strategy; and strategic due diligence reviews and integration planning.

Our experts partner with clients on corporate planning, providing perspective not only on immediate value and impact, but on long-term implications. We work closely with management and other advisers to leverage and complement their knowledge and ensure maximum impact, and actively support implementation and skill building.