Client Challenges

The financial crisis has exposed and exasperated many of the challenges the industry faces, such as shareholder return, regulatory reform, and aging infrastructure.

• Shareholder Return – Almost every financial services business is pressured in revenue and margin by the current economic and regulatory environment. Cost structures must be transformed to align with these pressures – adjustments are needed to operating models, products, channel strategies, fee structures, and day-to-day business practices.  For many this drives consolidation and the need to execute flawless internal or business-to-business integration.
• Financial Regulatory Reform – In and of itself, the financial legislation is driving much activity to gain clarity and define the best way to meet the anticipated data, information, fiduciary, and capital mandates while not crushing margins or hurting service delivery (e.g. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Basel III, Solvency II, and the Private Fund Investment Advisers Registration Act)
• Aging Systems Infrastructure – Over the last 30 years there has been an incredible degree of industry consolidation and technology improvement – every institution is burdened with keeping up.  At some point getting to a common operating platform is an ominous challenge.  Organizations can invest huge amounts of resources and yet end up having the “me too” systems and processes that don’t advance their strategic product or delivery capabilities nor necessarily improve their overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Despite these industry challenges, many of our clients are well positioned in the downturn and are gaining market share with creative products, delivery, and acquisitions.  Others are cutting costs, re-organizing for more effective delivery, and rebuilding their systems infrastructure.

For each of these clients and their unique circumstance, Guidon delivers fact-based, customized solutions and helps to execute rapid, sustainable improvement.

Our Capabilities

Over 30% of the client work we do is with Financial Institutions across the sector including commercial banks, investment banks, credit card businesses, property and casualty insurers, life insurers, and other non-traditional financial institutions.Our experiences span a broad set of initiatives and objectives including:

• Business and operating effectiveness
• Workforce management
• Cost reduction
• Due diligence and post-merger integration
• Business transformation
• Strategy development
• Product development and launch
• IT performance
• Legacy IT platform conversion
• Outsourcing
• Engagement and culture

Our consultants rely on an average of 15-20 years experience and proven approaches to quickly and affordably bridge the gap between complex business challenges and measurable results.  Our individual expertise covers most business functions such as operations, sourcing, finance, marketing, sales, human resources, and information technology.

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Example Impact

For each of our clients and their unique circumstance, Guidon delivers fact-based, customized solutions and helps to execute rapid, sustainable improvement – we do not rely on simple boilerplate solutions.

Our client relationships range from hot-spot tactical improvements to strategic multi-year transformations.  Regardless of the problem we are partnering to address, Guidon has a history of delivering significant measurable results with 3-5+ times return on investment while addressing challenges and paradoxes such as:

• Launching new products faster to rebuild the top line
• Mitigating the complexity and cost burden of increased regulatory requirements
• Improving service delivery while reducing costs
• Effectively and quickly managing integrations, mergers or outsourcings while improving process, technology and people
• Managing branch capacity and improving call center efficiency without sacrificing service
• Lowering technology, image and workflow spends without impacting the business strategic goals
• Growing profitability or return on assets in an environment of low interest rates and higher foreclosures
• Offering efficient but superior customer services while simultaneously expanding products and adopting new technology in a small-scale environment

From improving client response time to reducing expenses by millions of dollars, our solutions mean significant and measurable impact for your organization.

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Our consultants rely on an average of 15-20 years experience and proven approaches to quickly and affordably bridge the gap between complex business challenges and measurable results.

Short samples of our client impact are below and also on the case study page:

• Improving Consumer Credit Card Adoption and Utilization within a Retail Bank – An account that is pre-approved by the institution, but not used by its customers, represents a lost opportunity to do business with a good customer. See how Guidon helped an institution find out why customers were not taking advantage of their pre-approvals – and how the institution provided the value proposition to do so.
• Achieving Customer Service Level Requirements within Commercial Lending Operations – Guidon consultants helped the commercial operations of a top five Canadian bank, with more than $350 billion in assets, use Lean Sigma to improve its loan delivery process and transform the culture to one of continuous improvement.
• Developing an Integrated Fraud Claim System in a Multi-National Banking Firm – The processing of fraud/forgery claims for Regulation E (electronic transactions) and checking/savings accounts were merging into one operational site. Find out how Guidon helped retail management create a standard workflow, document system requirements for an integrated claims process, reduce the cycle time in the claims process and design a combined Fraud Claim System.
• Maintaining Service Levels While Managing Bank Operational Back Office Site Consolidation – A regional item processing business unit was consolidating three sites into one and had been tasked with achieving significant operational improvements in productivity, error and defect reduction, capital expense and capacity to accept additional volume.
• Streamlining the Selection, Approval and Funding Process of a Technology Project – A firm was struggling to obtain timely funding of major technology initiatives across its various lines of business, resulting in significant delays in the delivery of projects. Using Lean Sigma, Guidon helped the firm’s financial controller solve the problem.

Click here to view all Financial Services Case Studies.

Whether your organization is a bank, insurer, credit card company or other financial business, we invite you to explore our unique capabilities to quickly and affordably help you bridge the gap between complex problems and measurable results.

Representative Clients

• TD Canada Trust
• TD Wealth Management
• Empire Life Insurance
• Aviva, USA
• Kaiser Permanente
• Key Bank
• BB&T
• Symcor
• Total Merchant Services
• Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union

Testimonials

“Guidon consultants understand our challenges and speak our language. They have helped us leverage Lean Sigma principles and they are transferring knowledge that builds our intellectual capital”
– Paul Johnson, Director of Process Management, Symcor

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Click here to view all Financial Services News and Publications