Financial Services

Fijishi Financial Services is bringing a shift towards branchless banking solutions. Adoption of our branchless banking channels solutions and non-banking operating models in sectors other than financial services can help BFSI’s reduce their infrastructure investments by 30%. We work with our clients to build custom solutions that combine deep industry expertise, quantitative analytics, and research, while helping them build capabilities needed for long-term success.

How do we help clients?

Banking Risk & Resilience

We help financial services clients achieve extraordinary risk-adjusted performance.

Facing extreme volatility in financial and commodity markets, more and more of our clients are realizing that effective, risk-informed strategy can offer a major source of competitive advantage. We take a holistic approach to risk issues, combining deep industry insight and strategic skills with a structured risk-management approach, proven methodologies focused on true transformation, analytical tools, and practical implementation.

The Risk and Regulation Practice comprises a global community of experts who specialize in helping companies create value in a turbulent world. Our consultants and large analytics staff advise banks. We also collaborate with expert external advisers, who bring to bear decades of industry, regulatory, and academic experience.

Our four key areas of expertise are enterprise risk management and risk culture, credit risk, market and trading risk, and risk and regulation.

Enterprise Risk Management and Risk Culture - We help clients develop risk-management capabilities to support their strategic priorities, so they can protect the value of the company while growing the business profitably. Our integrated perspective on enterprise-wide risk enables us to support not only the chief risk officer (CRO) or CFO but the entire management team, including the CEO and other business leaders.
Credit Risk - We help financial institutions manage risk along the entire credit value chain, addressing challenges and opportunities related to origination and underwriting, credit-portfolio management, loss mitigation, credit modeling, and advanced analytics. In the last five years, we have completed more than 40 projects that maximized value and mitigated losses in our clients’ credit portfolios.
Risk and Regulation - We work with banks, insurers, regulators, and governments to quantify and address the operational and strategic impact of regulatory changes as well as to prepare for the implementation of new regulation.
Market and Trading Risk - We help companies create and preserve value by providing advice and analytics on managing market-risk exposures, selecting hedging strategies, and capturing market and trading opportunities.

Corporate & Investment Banking

We help investment banking clients meet a wide range of strategic, organizational, and operational demands.

The corporate and investment banking industry is in a period of uncertainty and transition, with banks still searching for sustainable models in the context of intense regulatory activity and capital challenges. Our practice has a proven record of innovation and impact working with capital markets and investment banking institutions to define strategies and priorities for a new banking era.

We work with a diverse set of banking and nonbanking institutions, including universal banks, securities firms, national banks, exchanges, and information providers. Our work encompasses overall strategies for the wholesale business and for specific products, client segments and geographies; organizational issues; performance improvement; and mergers and alliances. We also undertake work on client issues in information technology, risk management, branding and customer relationship management.

Financial Data, Infrastructure & Technology

Helping financial data, infrastructure, and technology (FDIT) providers achieve sustained growth and performance, transform their operating model, and enhance their resiliency.

FDIT firms are data and software service providers to the financial services community, operating at the intersection of finance and technology. These firms are playing an increasingly critical role across the financial services ecosystem. Our clients span exchanges, trading venues, custodians, clearing houses, financial data and analytics providers, credit agencies, and banking software providers.

What we do
Our practitioners are recognized thought leaders in this field and bring a wide breadth of financial services and technology expertise to support our clients by addressing topics such as:

Business builds - We partner with clients to define and execute initiatives for growth in existing business lines, as well as to launch and scale new businesses like data and analytics, digital assets, and private markets through our proven and unique Leap by Fijishi methodology.
Inorganic growth - We support clients across the M&A deal cycle, including the identification of strategically attractive acquisition opportunities, commercial due diligences on potential targets for both bolt-on and transformative acquisitions, and post-merger integration and planning.
Operating model transformations - We help blueprint new operating models and implement organizational changes to enhance sales effectiveness, become product driven, and innovate with data and technology at the speed of native technology firms.
Large-scale technology value assurance - We assist organizations as they derisk and accelerate their delivery of large-scale technology programs through the adoption of agile methodologies, proven value-assurance techniques, and rigorous project management.
Technology modernizations - We help companies define their future-state functional and technical architecture by means of embracing microservices, APIs, and cloud first, and plan and execute practical transformations from current to target states.
Risk & Resiliency - We work with our clients on non-financial risks (e.g., operational, cyber and technology as well as ESG) and financial risks. With our Risk Dynamics, we support clients in various areas of their financial risk framework (including liquidity risk and stress testing, valuation and margining), model risk management (including model governance, development, and validation standards), and model validation of pricing and risk models (including model review and benchmarking).

Insurance

Helping insurance companies navigate change to capture growth opportunities and create value in an increasingly digital world.

For insurers to achieve sustained growth in the digital era, they must make bold moves as well as targeted investments in capabilities and technology.

We are committed to helping our insurance clients across the life and P&C sectors achieve Change that Matters by transforming their strategy, core businesses, and operating models. Our global insurance professionals combine strategic thinking with deep knowledge across areas such as marketing and distribution, claims, core technology, underwriting and pricing, as well as enterprise capability building.

We partner with many of the top global insurers to help them implement innovative solutions and digital tools, enabling them to pursue new opportunities and anticipate a rapidly changing competitive landscape. Our expertise across geographies and product lines provides clients with a comprehensive, granular view of where they are and how to capitalize on growth opportunities.

What we do

Strategy - We build enduring value by identifying future growth opportunities across lines of business, market segments, and geographies.
Transformation - We unlock an organization’s full potential, achieving a competitive advantage by leveraging new technologies reimagining every facet of operations.
Productivity - We improve performance through digital innovation in products, services, processes, and business models.

Law Firms & Professional Services

We advise professional services institutions, including law firms, accounting firms, corporate legal departments, and other knowledge worker organizations, on a broad range of strategic, organizational, and operational issues.

Global professional services ecosystems are undergoing fundamental transformation. Digitization is transforming the nature of work, while organizations face mounting pressure to raise productivity and performance, and competition is forcing innovation in client service and in the market for talent.

Our practice has a proven track record of impact helping clients navigate uncertain environments by taking a “through cycle” mindset, giving appropriate attention to near-term pressures while laying the ground work and capabilities for long-term success.

Marketing & Sales

We work with financial services clients to generate long-term, sustainable growth. We work with consumer financial services organizations including life insurance and retirement companies, property and casualty insurers, retail banks, and consumer finance and mortgage lenders to generate sustainable long-term growth.

We integrate our knowledge of business strategy, organizational performance leadership, and operations excellence to serve clients through a comprehensive range of expertise on issues related to marketing and distribution.

What we do

Marketing spend optimization - We help clients take a holistic view of how they market their products and services, using a series of proven techniques to achieve significantly higher performance, from awareness to usage and consumer loyalty. By using both effectiveness and efficiency techniques, clients improve performance in their marketing investments, often reducing resources consumed by marketing activities
Distribution imperatives - Financial services firms must balance the need to reduce distribution costs, retain clients, retain advisers, and stimulate revenue. Our proprietary research on the behaviors and attitudes of both customers and advisers helps life insurers, wealth managers, and other financial firms address these multiple challenges.
Digital marketing - With increasing numbers of consumers selecting and interacting with financial services providers online, we partner with firms to refine their approach to digital marketing. Our work is based on primary research into customer needs and preferences.
Customer experience - We help clients evaluate current and potential service delivery models across channels, identify opportunities to create better experiences for their customers, and show how this enhanced experience can translate into economic value. Our proprietary approach and data on business and segment-specific consumer behavior enable clients to prioritize investments and optimize marketing spend.
Advisory sales force productivity - We work with clients to achieve and sustain revenue growth by improving the productivity of their advisory sales forces. We focus on understanding producer mind-sets and barriers to sales at various career stages, and we have proprietary research on several aspects of distribution, including meeting the needs of consumers as they prepare for and enter retirement. We have distinctive capabilities in sales-management, including recruiting, teams, training, compensation, and the roles played by two critical entities: the home office and front-line managers.

Operations & Technology

We help financial services firms navigate operations and IT challenges from the back office to the front line.

In an era of rapid technological change, we offer a range of services to help financial services firms improve business performance, reduce operational risk and develop compelling value propositions for their customers.

Our clients include leading banks, insurers, asset managers and payments players in all major markets. Our global network of practitioners and dedicated experts augment their work with a robust proprietary knowledge base comprised of research, benchmarks and tools.

We focus with clients on IT effectiveness and strategy; improving back-office performance; smart-sourcing; risk management; sales and marketing effectiveness; and large-scale program management. Our value proposition is concentrated on formulating solutions that create business value, both as architects of innovative solutions and as implementation co-managers.

Organization

We help leaders instill an impact-focused mind-set across their organization.

Most executives know intuitively what academic research has consistently confirmed: organizational factors are powerful drivers of strong, sustained business performance. Winning companies must periodically transform themselves to get—and stay—on top.

The Organization Practice helps clients across the financial services industry make the changes necessary to achieve and sustain success. We firmly believe that organizational factors are powerful drivers of strong, long-term business performance.

We serve financial services firms in several important areas:

Leadership - We work with clients to improve leadership behaviors over a relatively short period of time. We build alignment during the leadership journey and catalyze leadership teams to adopt a dynamic and impact-focused mind-set.
Performance transformation - Transformation is fundamental change that penetrates deep into an institution’s heart and mind and yields a significantly higher level of business performance and health. To drive change in short- and long-term performance, we help financial institutions make sustainable shifts in ambition, collective self-beliefs, behaviors, culture, capabilities, systems, and processes.
Organizational design - Recognizing that changing the structure of an organization is highly disruptive, we work with clients on design change only if the benefits are significant. We begin by diagnosing the potential value of a redesign and then focus on the elements that will most effectively drive performance and health. These may include defining an organization archetype, designing a formal management structure and optimal spans of control, maximizing the value of the corporate center and cross-business capabilities, developing performance-management systems, defining the appropriate level of outsourcing, developing an internal knowledge marketplace, and galvanizing social networks.
Merger management and integration - We help clients create a combined company postmerger with higher performance and greater momentum than that of either of the premerger companies. For the most recent research from our Organization Practice, visit Our Insights page.

Payments

We help payments players capture opportunities in a fast-changing environment.

The evolution of the payments industry continues to be driven by changes in technology and customer behavior. We work with clients to help them keep pace and capture the opportunities inherent in this shifting landscape. Our network across the globe serve banks, credit card companies, transaction processors, payments cooperatives, technology firms, and non-banks on issues ranging from overall payments strategy and implications to retail payments services, cash management, and payments technology.

We bring a breadth of expertise to our work with clients, starting at the top with integrated cross-institution payments strategy and developing responses to the rapidly changing payments landscape. On the corporate payments side, our work covers small-business payments services, corporate cash management, and interbank payments services; in retail we support clients on issues with credit and debit cards, ATMs, retail demand-deposit-accounts, and mobile payments. Our work on processing, outsourcing, and infrastructure management covers card processing and acquiring, electronic funds transfer/automated clearing house processing, ATM driving and switching, and item processing.

The Payments Practice is a recognized leader on topics such as payments profitability, the Single Euro Payments Area and the cost of cash, credit card strategy and marketing, and cross-bank payments strategy.

Retail & Small Business Banking

Rethinking banking. Reshaping banks.

Digital has changed banking forever. While people still need financial services, many no longer need a traditional “bank.” They need the right services at the right moments in the right ways.

We work hand-in-hand with financial institutions—pre-IPO fintechs, midcap banks, and the largest enterprises—to redefine how they create value for customers. Together, we’re putting people and technology at the heart of everything. We’re integrating channels, creating new products and experiences, and building our clients’ capabilities to win the race for the customer.

What we do

Fintechs - We collaborate with fintechs to help scale their business and supplement their teams. As a dedicated impact partner, we help organizations with accelerating sales and building alliance ecosystems, as well as hyper-scaling operating models and creating comprehensive M&A strategies.
Retail & Small Business Banks - We help banks rethink their businesses and value proposition to win in the digital arena, assisting with everything from reinventing the strategic vision and overhauling tech infrastructure to full-scale transformations and employee reskilling.

Strategy & Corporate Finance

We help financial services firms worldwide define, build, and maintain winning strategies.

Our network of strategists works with banks, insurers, asset managers and payments companies to help define, build and maintain winning business portfolios, align actions with long-term objectives, and balance risks.

We work with clients on issues relevant to the enterprise-wide management of their business, such as growth, portfolio mix, business unit strategy, the impact of global trends and the management of government stakeholders. Our partners and experts are well-versed in both top-down strategic approaches and in the innovation needed to compete in a global economy marked by disruptive technology and emerging markets.

Our corporate finance experts are the pre-eminent independent advisers on finance and value creation. We work with chief financial officers on finance organization, portfolio strategy and major investment decisions; linking corporate strategy to capital markets performance; investor communications; ensuring that M&A and other transactions are consistent with overall strategy; and strategic due diligence reviews and integration planning.

Our experts partner with clients on corporate planning, providing perspective not only on immediate value and impact, but on long-term implications. We work closely with management and other advisers to leverage and complement their knowledge and ensure maximum impact, and actively support implementation and skill building.

Wealth & Asset Management

We work with wealth managers, asset managers, and retirement players to create value in a fast-changing market.

Our clients are seeking deep and lasting strategic and operational improvement on growth and performance. We provide counsel on issues in strategy, organization, earnings improvement, IT and operations, and sales and marketing. We also partner with clients to develop sound observations about the future state of the industry, and to make strong strategic choices that will enable them to adapt and thrive in a changing market.

Our collaborative and fact-based approach relies on deep proprietary research that spans all institutional and retail segments, asset classes (for example, alternatives) and products, such as exchange traded funds and outcome-oriented funds. Our proprietary tools provide unique insights into the flows, assets, and economics of each of the sub-segments of these markets and into the preferences and behaviors of consumers, investors, and intermediaries.

We work across the full spectrum of challenges faced by our clients, including:

Growth - We help clients identify and embrace new markets and segments that lead to sustainable competitive advantage.
Operations - We help design and implement superior front- and back-office processes in research, portfolio management, risk management, technology, and distribution.
Organization - We partner with clients to develop optimal organizational structures and processes.
Investment performance - We support clients on portfolio management, research, and knowledge management, with a focus on superior execution. Through senior-level conferences and roundtables, we foster a regular exchange of current research and insight, and provide our clients with cutting-edge knowledge relevant to their strategic needs.