Central brochure

Refocusing on trust and relevance Refocusing on trust and relevance
Creating the client-centric capital markets
business of the future
Four key building-blocks
Accenture has helped a number of leading capital markets firms to reshape and
revitalise their client relationships. Our approach draws on our deep experience in
building and optimising customer relationship value across a wide range of
industries, while taking account of the unique characteristics, competitive dynamics
and opportunities inherent to the capital markets industry.
Based on this experience, we have defined an approach that is both pragmatic and
effective. Getting customer centricity off the ground does not require a large upfront
investment. Instead, a firm can make real and substantial progress by extracting
its existing client data, and applying relevant, targeted analytics quickly and at low
cost. The momentum behind the resulting ongoing improvement in client
relationships and profitability can then be built up progressively over time.
Our experience shows that four key steps can enable a capital markets firm to begin
the journey towards putting clients back at the heart of its business.
The four steps are:
1 Conduct basic analytics to understand clients’ needs and buying behaviours
2 Group clients into segments reflecting behaviour and need
3 Realign your product offering and delivery channels to support client needs
and profitability
4 Initiate actions to enhance your parent brand progressively over time
A firm that focuses successfully on all four of these areas will find it can build
deeper, more durable and more profitable client relationships based on mutual trust
and value.
1. Conduct basic analytics to understand clients’
buying needs
Building better and deeper client understanding may sound like a good idea in
theory. But how can it be achieved in practice? Many capital markets businesses
assume the answer must be a major multi-year, multi-million pound CRM investment
programme that transforms and integrates the management and analysis of client
data across the business. However, our experience shows that a more pragmatic and
phased approach — requiring far less up-front investment — actually has a far
greater chance of success.
In many cases, efforts to impose a customer-centric culture from top-down through
a massive systems implementation project fail because of three challenges. The first
is the siloed structure of much of the legacy IT infrastructure, with different business
units unable to share information easily or effectively. The second is issues around
data protection and client privacy, again preventing sharing of data. The third is that
embedded ‘fiefdoms’ in the business may be unwilling to share client information
and relationships that they feel belong to them individually, rather than to the firm
as a whole. These same barriers have the effect of impeding cross-selling and an allround
view of client profitability.
Starting small: a pragmatic approach to analytics
Given these issues, a ‘large’ systems implementation effort is usually not the best
way forward, and will struggle to deliver. Client data may exist at many points across
the business, in many formats. A more workable and effective solution may be to pull
together these disparate elements of data into one place, and then conduct analytics
to identify and understand the patterns in clients’ behaviours and needs.
In industries where companies have hundreds of thousands or even millions of
clients, this approach would be impracticable. But capital markets businesses benefit
from having relatively small numbers of relatively large clients, rather than a
multitude of small ones. And a comparatively limited amount of effort in pulling
together the required data can produce dramatic results, enabling the firm to create
hypotheses around how to improve the offering to each client, or at least clusters of
similar clients.
Launching a small initial pilot programme of client data analytics also brings several
additional benefits. By kick-starting deeper client understanding, it can help to
highlight not just patterns of client behaviour, but also the most pertinent elements
of data that will help to clarify and illuminate those patterns. As more and better
data is pulled in, the analytics can be iterated to progressively sharpen the insights.
And the early findings can be leveraged to produce ‘quick wins’ that deliver good
returns in a short timeframe, helping to sell the idea of analytics-based segmentation
to the sales team and across the business as a whole.
Compounding the benefits
Once the iterative analytics programme is embedded and gaining momentum, the
insights generated can be incorporated into the firm’s management information and
incentives going forward, thus facilitating the cultural shift required. One approach
for extending and embedding the programme is to build simple software that collects
and analyses the client data firm various sources — thereby replicating many of the
benefits of rebuilding the CRM infrastructure, but at a far lower cost and much
higher speed.
In the longer term, the benefits of better client understanding will be felt throughout
the organisation. By providing senior management with insights into why customers
buy particular product and service offerings, it enables the business to regain control
of client understanding and insight from the fiefdoms. Furthermore, unifying the
client data across products and sales teams enables individual client profitability to
be tracked, managed and improved. And if regulators ask why a particular product
was sold to a particular client, robust information is available to show why the
product purchase was in line with the client’s needs and behaviour.