Our expertise has been applied to a wide variety of assignments, from the investigation of a bank failure to the coordination and management of a banking service implementation involving more than sixty participants.

Strategy Development

We have assisted a major Australian retail bank and several of its business units to formulate and refine key aspects of their growth strategies over a number of years, from banking operations to electronic banking, and worked with two insurance companies in the same manner, assisting them in clarifying pathways to growth in difficult and highly contested environments. We have performed similar services for an electronic transaction processing organisation and credit unions.

In addition, project types have seen us:

• Conduct reviews of planning processes

• Articulate numerous divisional business plans, from retail operations to call centres and loan administration functions

• Advise on the development of strategic performance reports, and

• Provide coaching to senior executives in innovation-based strategy development.

Diagnostics

The structure and rigour of our analytical processes have been given full play in a range of assignments in the banking and finance industry, most of them in Australia, with additional involvement in New Zealand and South-East Asia.

We project-managed what was at the time the most comprehensive investigation into the collapse of an Australian retail and commercial bank, coordinating the activities of auditors, lawyers, business and systems analysts as well as other experts, and providing assistance to a Royal Commission in the process.

We have assessed the operational and organisational efficiency of:

• Internal audit functions

• Loan and cheque processing and administration operations

• Merchant acquirer services

• Credit card transaction processing operations

• Business banking centres

• Procurement services, and

• Corporate real estate services.

Business Performance Improvement

Following on from our diagnostic assignments, banking and finance organisations have often retained our services and extended contracts to have us assist in the design and implementation of change designed to boost performance. On some occasions, the work has focused on better aligning the organisation’s delivery capability to its business intent. On others, it has focused on the development of business models different to those in use in the industry to that date, effectively re-shaping the manner in which elements of the business had been done to that date, not only within the client organisation, but also among its competitors.

In those long and often complex exercises we have acted in a range of capacities:

• Clients have applied our methodologies to articulate, plan and test their approach to proposed organisational and operational change, using our facilitation services.

• They have called on us to develop the alternative model itself, or had us critique a range of possible approaches, as an aid to their selection of their preferred option.

• They have had us sit as Advisers on merger and acquisition committees and project groups.

• They have invited us to take charge of the change process itself, researching, analysing, articulating and implementing the new business approach.

• They have asked us to project-manage complex implementations with multiple participants.

“After years of experience and discussion with banking and finance practitioners, from line staff to business unit managers and executives to board members, coupled with dealings and assignments among their service providers and their customers, I believe we have earned our place at the table as a meaningful contributor to sensible growth”, says Benoit Trudeau, Managing Director.

“Our client relationships are long-standing ones, and the banking and finance stream continues to account for a substantial proportion of the Firm’s total work. If we did not consistently produce the expected results – or even better them, we would not have been able to develop the practice we now have, nor continue to win the assignments we do.”