The structure and competitive profile of the financial services industries are undergoing significant shifts, driven by the forces of deregulation, globalization and technological change. The traditional boundaries between the major sectors of the industry – banking, insurance, investment, securities – have largely disappeared. A new breed of fully integrated global competitors has emerged, achieving new levels of customer product choice, geographic reach and operational scale.

While some traditional business models have become less tenable, other new competitive types have emerged with value propositions focused on particular areas of the industry value chain, or specific product types or customer segments. The structure of distribution channels has also been changing. In some markets intermediaries have been eliminated by technology, in other areas the role of the channel has become more important due to price competition and product commoditization.

Our Capabilities

Alliance's Financial Services practice helps clients seeking to develop effective competitive strategies in this changed and more complex competitive environment, and enhance their revenue and profit performance. Our work has covered all industry sectors, including retail and commercial banking, life insurance, investment management, investment banking and financial data processing. We also have specialist product capabilities across all the major product and service categories within these market sectors. We have a number of capabilities for assisting our financial services clients with their businesses, and in particular excel in:

• Finding profitable new customers or emerging customer groups through rigorous customer needs analysis and segmentation, and developing programs to attract these customers
• Tailoring programs to recognize and retain the most attractive customer segments and growing product usage based on applying detailed customer knowledge
• Identifying new opportunities for product innovation, and increasing the speed and organizational effectiveness of the new product development process
• Identifying and exploiting untapped opportunities for new products and added-value services to generate additional revenue streams from existing customers
• Defining, growing and retaining profitable relationships with distribution intermediaries through targeted information and incentive programs, and innovative value-added services
• Aligning sales, service, operations, organizational structure, and technology architectures to deliver customized levels of service to targeted customer segments

Case Studies

• Developing ethnic marketing strategy in retail banking
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• Competing with customer service in insurance
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• Product repositioning in investment management
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• New product platform in corporate banking
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