Financial Services

Banks (wholesale and retail) are facing the twin pressures of increased competition and greater regulatory/capital requirements. Competition is visible in terms of globilisation, new entrants and alternative delivery channels, while the nature of the relationships that banks hold with customers continues to evolve. Regulators will demand higher capital provisions and banks will need to respond to government initiatives such as the Independent Commission on Banking, chaired by Sir John Vickers to consider capital and structural reforms, and Project Merlin focused on increased lending and greater transparency.

Insurance companies face many of the same cost, competition and regulatory pressures, and now have to cope with massive claims from a series of natural disasters.

The ability of financial services institutions to manage a vast array of complex changes across many channels, services, technologies and regions is going to be a pivotal factor in business success or failure.

At Project One our expertise in managing complex change programmes has proved to be a vital service to our financial services clients. Examples of our change management experience include:

• managing delivery of complex regulatory change such as Basel II, working with our clients' subject matter experts and their specialist third parties
• large scale business transformation programmes to launch or change the customer proposition or radically change the business operating model
• people change initiatives such as leadership development and sales force transformation 
• rollout of complex technology solutions to a branch network
• performance improvement of channel-specific products, focused on growth
• outsourcing of legacy products
• transformation of the IT function to improve service performance

At a time when the scale and complexity of change is increasing, Project One's ability to bring clarity and pace to change will play an increasingly important role in helping financial institutions manage the challenges and embrace the opportunities.