Our client was experiencing extended back office processing times for the onboarding of new customers. The period between the initial new client meeting and achieving Funds Under Management exceeded 90 days. Through organisational re-design, we reduced the end-to-end processing time by 50% and quality escapes by 80%.

In the last decade, the expansion of the compliance role has been mission critical. However, there is little data for management to know where their business sits on the cost curve of compliance, relative to their industry peers. We review, map and analyse the existing compliance function, providing insights based on industry best practice and bench marking. This may allow the stretching of the compliance spend by up to 40%.

Within a major financial institution, the risk and compliance reporting process was not robust enough to prevent quality escapes. This, in turn, led to potential compliance violations. Using root cause analysis, process re-design and training on the reporting process, we reduced quality escape occurrence by 100%.

Increased regulatory compliance requirements and externally driven deadlines have given rise to compliance process, manual workarounds and multiple bespoke solutions. We collaboratively develop, refine and implement highly-efficient Task Lists and Standard Operations for critical tasks, reducing the possibility of error.

By identifying boutique EFM’s with substandard currency overlay performance, analysing currency deviations and resulting currency P&L deviations, effective initiatives were designed. These included total return mandates, minimum performance thresholds and new controls over EFM management including requirements for hedging FX risk. These developments resulted in a US$12M improvement.

We work with medium and large sales organisations in financial institutions to sustainably increase their sales revenue by 15–35% within six to nine months. We help identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness and conversion rates of the sales team, also optimising and balancing the back end of the business. This ensures the increased volumes are processed more rapidly and cost effectively, limiting deterioration in service and customer satisfaction.

We work with medium and large organisations in financial services and banking, reducing their cost of sale by on average 20-25%. These reductions immediately flow through to improved margins and profitability. This is achieved by partnering with our clients to design, deploy and execute a balanced set of practical improvement initiatives. These initiatives utilise our process improvement, systems thinking, change management and execution expertise.

Historically, mortgages were recorded by customer rather than geographic location or property type. Changes to capture additional data for risk weighting required parallel systems and extensive reworking. However, these initiatives reduced capital costs significantly.

The reconciliation of manual payments for private mortgage clients was carried out on multiple IT platforms with manual intervention. This lead to extended processing times and quality escapes. A system review and re-design reduced the processing time by 65% and decreased quality escapes by 92%.

Settlement delays and errors from the middle and back office were leading to operational losses and brand damage with clients. Identifying the root cause of the issue through process examination allowed a revised process, hence reducing operational losses due to settlement delays and errors by 79%.

A facilitated mapping exercise enabled our client to identify three key areas of opportunity; risk, operational inefficiency and audit strategy. These findings resulted in the realignment of 13 asset classes into six, FTE reduction and an improvement in transparency, with US$4M in savings.