Financial Services
The new performance standard
The financial services sector finds itself at the intersection of global megatrends. These include smart devices, hyper-personalization of products, and aging populations. However, none is as impactful as digital transformation.
Today, banks, insurers, and asset management companies are as much tech companies as they are financial firms. COVID has been a powerful accelerant and an indiscriminate revealer of competitive advantage as relationships are growingly direct and disintermediated. Agility and early investment in digitization has yielded high dividends in terms of market share and profit capture.
The emergence of new classes of underserved customers and the inclusion of social themes are also disrupting the sector. Consumer-tailored services is the new performance standard. Access to advanced data and analytics is now table stakes to effectively reach these new customer segments.
With burgeoning opportunities come significant challenges. Tech-savvy consumer expectations are rapidly evolving, putting a premium on agility and speed, characteristics not traditionally associated with banks and insurers. Surveys clearly suggest consumers trust Big Tech more than big banks. New tech entrants such as Amazon, Apple, and Google severely threaten incumbents with digital wallets exempting merchants from interchange fees.
These disruptive forces, augmented by increasing uncertainty and complexity, drive the need for greater clarity when determining and then navigating the right strategic course of action and investment.
How Pointe can help
Pointe has been helping financial services firms sift through the external noise and develop winning strategies for over a decade. Our approach is unapologetically evidence-based and grounded in our deep industry expertise and creative analytics to provide an unmatched view on the market’s direction and bring clarify to the path forward.
Pointe’s solutions include:
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Mergers & Acquisition: We help validate and empower intended inorganic strategy by identifying acquisition candidates, diligencing specific targets, and executing on consolidation mandates.
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Growth Strategy & Investment Analysis: We create value by identifying available white space and assessing attractiveness and feasibility of multiple opportunities from immediate adjacencies to more transformative plays. We also quantify market size, growth, and segment to determine the most important areas to target.
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Market Analysis & Benchmarking: We bring clarity to strategic processes by mapping the emerging competitive landscapes, tracking critical competitive disruptions/threats, and benchmarking future competitor capabilities. Our insights anticipate moves to stay ahead of the competition and develop sell-against strategies and recommendations to maximize share gain.
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Customer Insights: We provide deep learnings around customers, including customer characteristics, sentiment, and demand by developing archetypes, to enable our clients to craft product, marketing, and pursuit strategies tailored to customer preferences.
Success Stories
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A major credit card network wanted to grow its global T&E business and enhance its go-to-market approached. Pointe mapped the T&E vendor buying process, customer key purchasing criteria, and best practices leveraged by the market leader to develop a new value proposition and positioning strategy. The client was able to utilize customer and competitor strategy recommendations to revamp its go-to-market approach, protect and renew current accounts, and convert competitor accounts.
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A major insurer was developing its digital strategy. Pointe analyzed the market and benchmarked other firms’ digital journeys to determine best practices and competitive gaps. From there, Pointe built a roadmap to ensure the client developed a digital experience that was customer-focused and provided measurable improvements.
