For most of the twentieth century, financial institutions were not known for their agility. But today, as technology turbocharges new product development and raises the expectations of both customers and decision makers, financial institutions must become as skilled in information management, organizational change, and real-time management as Silicon Valley high-tech firms.

Increased regulation and changing customer demands are forcing financial providers to become more efficient and innovative, and to deliver products and services with agility and at lower costs. This requires strategic prioritization along with superb design, usability testing, and management and project skills.

We work with financial institutions to provide immediate and ongoing value in several ways:

• Bring complexity under control. Controlling the complexity of products, processes, and procedures requires a comprehensive approach with an executive-led strategic view that introduces data and information transparency, a total-value-chain perspective, and the right processes and tools. Because we recognize that complexity can both create and destroy value, our assessment enables organizations to establish the value and benefits that will lead to the best decisions.
• Improve cost-to-serve performance. Deconstructing the financial services value chain has been a popular topic for years. In working with many clients around the globally on value chain issues, we have developed detailed "should-cost" models for a broad portfolio of middle- and back-office functions. We help organizations determine their cost-to-serve compared to industry and market benchmarks. In addition, our analysis enables organizations to determine next the tactical make-versus-buy decisions and to follow through on implementation.
• Reconfigure operational sites. Improving processes, quality, organization, and cost begins by examining economies of scope and scale. Skills training and automation represent useful ways of changing the effectiveness of delivery, but represent only two of the ways we help our clients identify operational performance improvement opportunities. Most organizations have plenty of untapped potential to improve operations.
• Optimize footprints. Optimizing the geographic presence of any company requires a keen understanding of how best to exploit scale, scope, capacity utilization, and experience curves while minimizing unnecessary or costly complexity. This process can occur within an existing location or network of locations, or as a result of new greenfield operations, centralization, outsourcing, or partnering. Our center assessment methodology augment these improvements by using real estate rationalization techniques and operating-model dynamics.
• Outsource business processes and IT. Outsourcing and offshoring decisions often seem deceptively easy. Proper expertise is critical for successfully outsourcing processes, particularly when moving beyond back-office activities to more complex and sensitive "middle-office" activities. The greater the value added, the more important it is to plan the outsourcing project. Our unparalleled expertise includes supplier selection and management, process transfer, and, just as importantly, the retaining of key staff and knowledge.
• Establish and improve sourcing and supplier management. Improving the purchasing organization and conducting strategic sourcing across all spending areas are relatively straightforward and can deliver immediate in-year savings. We have helped our clients optimize billions of dollars in spending, helping them realize, on average, 18 percent cost reduction. Financial institutions are now expanding the scope of their spending analysis and pursuing new approaches to increase their margins from procurement and contracting improvement. We have expertise with these broader, more complex programs, which typically require deep industry knowledge and innovative analytical techniques.

These services combine to help our clients develop the agility and differentiated operations required for success in the increasingly challenging financial services sector.