The many forces of change facing financial services provide both a push and a pull factor for firms to transform – to optimise performance and to reduce their cost to income ratio.

Currently Financial Services firms are seeking to survive and ideally thrive in an environment impacted by:

• Rapidly rising interest rates.
• New regulation like Consumer Duty driving change and incurring costs across the customer journeys, for all products and services.
• Cost of living crisis and governmental interventions like the Mortgage Charter.
• Traditional and non-traditional competitors making technology advances, disaggregating the value chain whilst encouraging more and more consumers to start their financial journeys online.
• Mergers and acquisitions in pursuit of capabilities and scale.
• Ongoing upgrading of legacy technology, adopting new data capabilities and digitising the ecosystem.

Most firms are, or are planning to transform themselves and optimise their business performance. Whether facing external factors or leveraging current strengths and investments made, push and pull factors include:

• Exploiting leading technologies (including AI) and increasing automation to reduce manual effort, improve customer experience and reduce the cost to serve.
• Simplification of product set, partly driven by Consumer Duty, and a desire to exit from transaction business. Refining propositions from ‘channel of choice’ to ‘digital first and human next’ and removing inconsistency from customer journeys based on channel.
• Adapting to the evolving risk landscape by supplementing traditional ‘file sampling’ with smarter use of data, to provide greater assurance and maintain operational resilience, including across their supply chain.

Whilst not easy to execute these initiatives it is possible to deliver benefit to the trinity of customers, colleagues and investors, whilst also avoiding the many pitfalls that have littered similar transformation paths.

Speak to us to discuss our proven methodologies and experience, so we can help your firm to reduce costs whilst improving outcomes.

If you would like to have a conversation with us about helping you, please get in touch with myself or a member of our Consulting team.