Client
Financial services client
Industry
Financial services
Our role
Consulting
Featuring
PwC South Africa
Background
A financial services company (a securities servicing leader that monetises its front-, middle- and back-office capabilities) faced challenges in the macro-economic environment and experienced issues in the cost, scalability and quality of service delivery. As part of the strategic cost management initiative, the firm wanted to achieve ~ $600 m in run rate savings.
Key issues
- Client faced a challenging macro-economic environment (increasing compliance complexity and increasing regulation decreasing profitability of core services such as securities lending).
- Services were limited in their scalability (growing complexity, one-off reports and inflexible systems limiting profitable growth; operating model relying on many small manual groups that could not be efficiently scaled).
- Customers experienced inconsistent service delivery (clients increasingly demanded more complicated and timely service delivery; lack of standardised products and communication within and across business units).
- Client had a high cost to deliver services (lack of standardisation processes across clients, high number of manual processes, increasing customisation for clients).
Strategy& contribution
- Four key levers were used to deliver savings and transform the operating model (process transformation, consolidation and infrastructure rationalisation, span/layer and staff/skill optimisation and digitisation).
- The levers were applied across both operations and technology teams to
drive transformation. - We standardised 15 critical end-to-end processes to take out significant cost and created high-value centres of excellence.
- We applied a data-driven, lean-led approach that ensures broad and sustainable results.
- We transformed technology through demand management, including zero-based application support and development.
Results
- Overall, our process transformation efforts significantly reduced risk while increasing capacity by 25%.
- Utilised lean methodologies to design an operating model that ensures core functions are aligned with client needs.
- Sustained investments in capabilities to accelerate the development of leading-edge solutions for its clients.
- Expected to achieve annual pre-tax run-rate expense savings from these actions of $575 m – $625 m by the end of 2014.
- Designed a robust implementation plan to ensure that the capabilities were embedded, working with local experts.
Contact us
Chantal Maritz
Director | Strategy& Payments Transformation, PwC South Africa
Tel: +27 (0) 11 287 0289
