DIGITAL & TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION
Using our philosophy of strategic execution to help define and rapidly bring strategic efforts and transformations to fruition.
New Product Design & Operationalization
Kepler Cannon combines deep industry knowledge and analytically derived product attributes based on customer interactions, activity, and survey inputs. We leverage this data and information not only to design the product, but to build in depth business cases based on granular customer-level data that can give meaningful insight into the expected business impact of proposed offerings.
Given our industry experience and the scar tissue of our team’s C-suite executives, we know that product design and strategy is only the start. Being able to effectively operationalize and deliver a new offering requires detailed operational planning and execution definition. Our product knowledge has given us a deep understating of typical roadblocks and key questions to be answered. We leverage this knowledge to fast-track build-out and attack key issues with great efficiency and efficacy.
Business Transformation
Whether it is a spin-off, merger, or internal reorganization, large organizational changes benefit significantly from applying the lens of strategic execution we bring to the table. Our C-suite executives have real-life experience with large transformations, and our consultants are deeply knowledgeable of the industry and effective change management to ensure seamless success. Most importantly, however, we understand how critical it is to integrate and partner with the core teams we work with throughout a large transformation. We view ourselves as an extension to your team, not just a group of advisors; we believe in collaboration to drive success.
IT Strategy & Transformation
The foundational backbone of any financial services firm in today’s day and age is strong technology environment and gg-forward strategy. With many of the top firms in the industry spending over $1B USD in technology spend, there is tremendous opportunity for waste, inefficiency, and misguided spend that is not aligned with the core vision of the firm.
Kepler Cannon works seamlessly with business and technology leaders to develop detailed, in-depth, and actionable IT strategy roadmaps, with quantifiable growth enablement, savings and efficiency gains, and other business & organizational impacts. These roadmaps can entail infrastructure overhauls, core platform changes, application rationalization, and key capability build-outs required to successfully and efficiently deliver against the business strategy.
Investment Portfolio Optimization & Rationalization
Firms spend billions of dollars on change initiatives every year. However, applying a strategic lens to ensuring that each investment dollar is likely to lead to the greatest possible ROI is not something that is always done methodically or effectively. We help our clients streamline and target their investment in the most meaningful areas by developing robust business cases to help quantify the impact of each initiative.
26 %
higher profitability at companies with successful digital transformation, as opposed to traditional business models
400
number of times the words "agile", "disrupt", and "adapt" were mentioned in the annual reports of the top 20 global banks
percentage of Fortune 500 businesses from 1950 that are still in business. Transformation is key to keeping your business model sustainable in the future.
Perspectives: Strategy & Transformation
The Unbundling of Retail Banking
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.
Role Reversal: The Future of US Banks in the Online Lending Market
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.
(Not) Selling Life Insurance in Asia
Amidst a boom in insurance business, Asian consumers remain largely underinsured.
The Growing Asian Wealth Management Market: Capturing the Mass Affluent Opportunity
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.
Reshaping the Indian Life Insurance Market
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.
Enabling Growth through Practice Management
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 Blockchain Contracts: Are We Finally Going Paperless?
Smart contacts offer the potential to facilitate or fully automate processes that are heavily paper-based today, particularly long-winded, expensive legal processes.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Blockchain (But Were Too Afraid to Ask)
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.
Third Party Vendor Risk – A Continuous Mitigation Strategy
The last thing any multinational organization wants to worry about are business and compliance risks introduced by third party vendors.
How Global Resourcing May Be Killing Your Company’s Efficiency
As global firms respond to the post-Great Recession regulatory and economic realities, efficiency of the back-office has become critical to ongoing success.
Are Blockchains Evolving Like Securities Exchanges?
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)
Wiser Data Augmentation
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.
Reducing Strategic Over-Dependence on IT Vendors
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.
Putting IT Infra Consumers on a Diet
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.
Driving Productivity Through Systems Selection
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.
Third Party Information Risk Mitigation
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.
Data-driven Spend Analysis: Maximizing Spend Reduction with Minimal Organizational Drag
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.
Customer Engagement Index
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.
An Agile Approach to Digitalizing Wholesale Banking
Credit has seen its fair share of ups and downs, from being the crux of financial services, to commoditization and mass distribution, to now being re-engineered. In the realm of Wholesale Credit, a revolution is underway.
Trends in Digitalization of Insurance
For some, Insurance might seem a monolithic industry, but for the ones keeping a close eye on it- Insurance is revamping itself faster than ever!
From days when underwriting a simple policy would take weeks and months, to now when it can be done in seconds with a simple ‘selfie’ - there seem to be no bounds in the future of this industry.
The Path to Decentralized Finance
We are on the cusp of a revolution within financial services that will have far-reaching ramifications for the +1 billion unbanked, current models of financial intermediation across entities and borders, and ultimately the very nature of how end-consumers understand financial health. As this understanding held by customers evolves, so too must the operations, services, and visions of providers.
How to Thrive in the New Normal
Now that Business As Usual is unusual, leaders are forced to re-imagine business models and build ‘winning strategies’ - to not only survive the pandemic but also emerge as successful change-makers, shaping an altered business reality.
Reshaping Wealth Tech
Before the Covid-19 inducted recession, the wealth tech sector was already experiencing a slowdown - both in the number of new startups and total capital raised. Now more than ever, investors and operators must be bold in re-inventing their Firm's long-term value proposition.
Reimagining Marketing
The COVID-19 pandemic has re-shaped the landscape for marketers. They are not only forced to cut budgets to save costs, but also face the challenge of keeping up with new emerging customer behaviors. These unprecedented changes call for a broader shift in marketing tactics and investments to successfully navigate the current transformed landscape.
Path to Innovation
Innovation has been in vogue for over a decade but the need to be innovative has never been felt as strongly as today. As businesses are learning to thrive under the lasting effects of the pandemic, they need to reinvent products, services and customer experiences to satiate emerging patterns of demand. To truly capitalize on the opportunity, business leaders need to look beyond internal capabilities and embrace a networked model of innovation to drive positive impact.
Business Analytics in Pandemic Times
Strategic direction is evolving rapidly during COVID-19. Businesses are struggling with ways to respond to the pandemic and have numerous challenges facing them including potentially significant revenue shifts, interaction changes and resource limitations.
Fortunately, organizations can analyze readily available data by using both business and data intelligence to better serve their customers.
The Cloud-Native Paradigm
Strategic direction is evolving rapidly during COVID-19. Businesses are struggling with ways to respond to the pandemic and have numerous challenges facing them including potentially significant revenue shifts, interaction changes and resource limitations.
Fortunately, organizations can analyze readily available data by using both business and data intelligence to better serve their customers.
Solving the Data Conundrum
Strategic direction is evolving rapidly during COVID-19. Businesses are struggling with ways to respond to the pandemic and have numerous challenges facing them including potentially significant revenue shifts, interaction changes and resource limitations.
Fortunately, organizations can analyze readily available data by using both business and data intelligence to better serve their customers.
The Tale of Two Countries – Insurance
The pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for the insurance industry. Experiences of the world’s biggest economies (U.S. & China) offer valuable lessons as to where the industry can improve and change in order to better handle similar events in future and build sustainable risk management systems.
Mastering Cloud Infrastructure Spend
As enterprises complete their cloud migration journey, an increasing amount of corporate money is being pushed into cloud, and the very nature of the cost-head is shifting from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. Lack of visibility into real-time usage, unnecessary wastage of cloud resources, coupled with pay-per-go scheme of public clouds, is creating a significant dent in IT budgets.
Ensuring Loyalty of your Prized Clients
We are on the cusp of a revolution within financial services that will have far-reaching ramifications for the +1 billion unbanked, current models of financial intermediation across entities and borders, and ultimately the very nature of how end-consumers understand financial health. As this understanding held by customers evolves, so too must the operations, services, and visions of providers.
Embracing Open Banking
We are on the cusp of a revolution within financial services that will have far-reaching ramifications for the +1 billion unbanked, current models of financial intermediation across entities and borders, and ultimately the very nature of how end-consumers understand financial health. As this understanding held by customers evolves, so too must the operations, services, and visions of providers.
Realizing the Reality of Real Time Payments
Real time payment (RTP) transactions are likely to exceed 300B by 2023, growing at 40% per year worldwide. Financial Institutions need to quickly find their own space in this ecosystem. They must redefine their value proposition and rethink their business models around this phenomenon.
Putting Customers At The Core of Your Business
Digital Transformation is about developing new capabilities and leveraging new channels to design and deliver a better client experience.
Winning in Mature Markets
Competition is an important facet of business world, and the process of seeking growth is a continuous one. One should never stop trying to win new customers or retain existing ones. After all, competitors are always trying to win your customers over, especially in mature markets.
Navigating the Buy Now Pay Later Era
The rising aspirations of consumers combined with the limited access to, and opaque nature of traditional financing solutions, has given rise to innovative products for underserved segments. BNPL is one such solution that offers short-term financing to users with the ability to pay in definite installments with low to no interest rates.
Modernizing Credit Cards in LatAm
Over the past decade, the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) credit card industry has enjoyed explosive growth. What makes credit cards important for LAC’s issuer portfolios?
Latent Growth in LatAm Credit Cards
The payments industry has been experiencing explosive growth across Latin America over the past few years: cash usage has decreased ~20% as consumers pivoted towards payment products that are well integrated into the financial ecosystem.