InsightAsia’s Banking & Finance consulting division is able to offer a broad range of strategic expertise across the key areas in which banks, as individuated entities tend to operate. We label this area the “banking matrix”.

 
The “banking matrix” is recognition that the financial institution is a large, complex and interconnected entity on the one hand, yet its constituent parts can be reactive, break off to form loosely connected hybrids, or wind up operating as relational satellites.

InsightAsia B&F Consultants are experienced. We have worked in a variety of strategic contexts across most areas of activity within the banking matrix. It is this experience that gives us a hard grounded commerciality to our approach that provides the “cut thru” to our research and consulting offerings.

Our practice is headquartered in Singapore, but we regularly utilize regional research professionals within the InsightAsia organization, to add “on the ground” localized solutions for banking clients. In addition we also regularly utilize the analytical consulting resources of the Synapse organization. Therefore, at any one time we are capable of providing an experienced and dependable combination of research/analytics/advisory professionals, depending on project requirements.

Research

IA B&F Consulting is uniquely poistioned in the consulting sector in that we can draw on full spectrum of qualitative and quantitative research techniques from InsightAsia, across the Asian region. This keeps the potential scope of our engagements very broad. For example, if you want to devise credit card strategy for Thailand, or expand an SME business unit in Indonesia, or acquire demographic profiles of High Net Worth Individuals in China, our recommendations are always underpinned by a solid local research foundation. 

Our experience tells us there is often a wealth of critical business intelligence implicit in bank data warehouses that is capable of being utilized to improve bank sales and profitability. We have consultants with deep experience in bank data manipulation for improvement in two core areas:

• Performance Analytics –

• Used for the development of detailed performance benchmarks across bank activity area.
• Sales Improvement – eg. Return on Marketing Investment

• Customer Analytics
• Cross-sell up-sell
• Loyalty Management
• Customer Profitability Analysis

IA B&F Consulting has professional staff with expertise and strong backgrounds in corporate strategy. Areas in which we have worked for banks have included the following: 

• Identifying attractive acquisition target
• Industry appraisals
• Regional market entry scenarios
• Forecasting
• Corporate alliance assessment
• Assisting in any sales/divestment process
• Issue based surveys with CEOs

The combination of: deep experience in banking strategy issues; the ability to leverage off the InsightAsia research network; our analytics expertise; and finally, our willingness to engage proactively with senior finance professionals in the region, puts us in a strong position to give commercially credible strategic advice to banks.

The InsightAsia research organization has professionals in regional offices with broad levels of experience in bank market research. Our Banking & Finance consulting division is able to draw on this expertise depending on the nature of the engagement. The B&F consulting division itself has professionals with more than fourteen years in industry analysis and corporate strategy experience, who have worked in most areas of Banking and in a wide variety of contexts– included Retail Banking, SME/Corporate Banking, Private Banking and Investment Banking.

We offer a full range of market research services for the financial sector, including:

• Brand management and performance tracking
• Customer satisfaction measurement
• Competitive intelligence evaluation, including service ‘mystery shop’ assessments
• Customer acquisition & segmentation
• New Product/service mix evaluation and positioning development
• Communications/brochure and product information evaluation

In addition we have developed a number of areas of practice excellence in the consulting arena that we wish to highlight.

Private Banking – The Rainmaker

The Rainmaker It is a HNW customer acquisition assistance tool, designed for Private Banking. It is an effective approach that utilizes the professional skills and regional infrastructure of InsightAsia as a pan-Asian research organization. Its key deliverable is to assist clients with Sales or AUM for Private Banks. It does this by understanding the unique needs & investment concerns of the target and the industries they work within, providing invaluable relationship development information which can be utilised to raise the profile and stature of a Private Bank in an industry sector or region, and provide marketing differentiation from other private banks. We have completed Rainmaker projects for clients in Indonesia and Thailand.

As part of its intial practice development, IA B&F Consulting scoped out the viability of industry-wide collaboration between banks for performance improvement. Called the M3 Alliance (Micro Market Mapping), it is a continuous customer growth and operational improvement tool. 

• M3 Alliance applies
• proprietary research methodologies
• market modeling expertise
• M3 Alliance consults with bank staff
• to ensure minimal workflow for Bank IT/analytics staff
• to ensure uniformity of intelligence supplied
• M3 Alliance collects summaries of customer and transaction information
• M3 Alliance collates, analyses and issues highly accurate, customized market intelligence reports
• Client Banks gain access to confidential micro market insights

IA B&F Consulting initially scoped out the viability for this type of alliance in the internet banking channel in Singapore. Based on the initial response we will consider moving the Alliance across the region.