Not unlike a piece of software, retail banking can be portrayed as a stack comprised of 3 layers, where the complexity of each services can be abstracted into discrete segments and end products.

Following the financial crisis in 2008, Fintech startups gained a lot of prominence globally as consumers started to look for alternatives to traditional banking methods. These startups have penetrated every service area of consumer retail banking with the goal of dis-intermediating banks and becoming the new leaders of the financial services industry.

Amidst a boom in insurance business, Asian consumers remain largely underinsured.

One of the largest and fastest growing wealth segments, the Asian mass affluent, is projected to hold $43.3 trillion in assets by 2020, yet only 20% of all wealth in Asia is tapped by the wealth management industry.

The Indian life insurance market is the fifth largest in the world.  Although the per capita premium remains lower than in other emerging markets, the size and growth of India’s working class remains one of the largest globally, presenting enormous opportunity for life insurance companies to expand into and within the Indian market.

In the world of financial advisory, growth strategies often focus squarely on the end client; after all, growth is achieved through new client acquisition or new asset acquisition from existing clients.  While this logic is not incorrect, it fails to acknowledge the intricacies of third party distribution. 

Smart contacts offer the potential to facilitate or fully automate processes that are heavily paper-based today, particularly long-winded, expensive legal processes.

As cryptocurrencies and their underlying ledger system gain momentum, many financial institutions are trying to determine how to best be part of this revolution. In particular, they want to know how best to update their existing IT architectures and operations to capitalize on this new technology.

The last thing any multinational organization wants to worry about are business and compliance risks introduced by third party vendors.

As global firms respond to the post-Great Recession regulatory and economic realities, efficiency of the back-office has become critical to ongoing success.

Driven by data security concerns, a majority of financial institutions are now looking at so-called private or hybrid blockchains, rather than fully decentralized public blockchains (like the blockchain used for Bitcoin)

It is well known that one way to make better predictions about how your customers, distributors and suppliers will behave, is to augment your own data with that of third parties.

Over time, many firms realize that they have become so reliant on vendors/contractor for critical knowledge on key applications, that they have, in fact, ceded control of those applications to the vendors.

One question seldom asked is “how do I put my (IT infrastructure) customers on a diet?” The demand side is often assumed as a given, and there is with little assessment of (over-) consumption by applications.

Procurement often involves multiple disparate stakeholders, systems and protocol. This complexity results in increased reliance on inefficient sourcing processes and only partially takes advantage of all the benefits available from supplier competition.

It is well known that one way to make better predictions about how your customers, distributors and suppliers will behave, is to augment your own data with that of third parties.

Some clients have even deemed spend reduction in procurement categories like legal services, where recourses and expertise are concentrated within humans not technology, to be intractable. At Kepler Cannon, we continuously challenge these sorts of conventional wisdom.

With the digitization of almost every element of the procurement process, large organizations are accumulating vast stores of data regarding their spending habits. Owing to its complex nature however, senior leadership is often at a loss when it comes time to mine this data and enact structural change based on the insight it provides.

While firms have found tremendous success in using these loyalty metrics to successfully grow customer relationships, they are lagging indicators and provide little help in providing immediate insight into whether or not improvements and initiatives are moving the needle.