In the new open banking world, as customer expectations are increasingly defined by standards driven by fintechs, neobanks and other more agile digital firms, traditional banking rules and value propositions no longer apply. To grow and protect their position, banks and financial service firms need to evolve and reimagine their business and their client engagement.
Similarly, complex regulatory rules, expensive legacy assets, and looming cybersecurity threats are pressuring many banks and other financial institutions to rethink their operating models.
Customers are nowgetting a real choice, with new innovative propositions, new challenger banks, openbanking, and ever greater access to digital services. To meet these rising consumer and business banking demands for ease and integration, financial services organisations are having to redefine who they are. It’s not enough to be bankers anymore: financial services organisations must be sophisticated technology experts, too.
Henderton helps create true differentiation, from planning and strategy to design and implementation, and has advised retail banks of all sizes, from regional banks to the world's largest banking institutions. We help these clients create real differentiation from better product, pricing, marketing and sales strategies.
The evolution of the payments industry continues to be driven by changes in technology and customer behaviour. The mobilisation of payments opens the door to new entrants from other sectors, such as mobile phone manufacturers, OS developers, telecom companies and start-ups. In addition to intensifying competition, the increasing regulatory burden and evolving national payment schemes and switches are causing incumbent players to revaluate their ways of doing business.
We work with clients to help them keep pace and identify the opportunities in this shifting landscape of banks, credit card companies, transaction processors, technology firms, and non-banks on issues ranging from overall payments strategy and implications to retail payments services and payments technology. We support clients on issues with credit and debit cards, ATMs, retail demand-deposit-accounts, and mobile payments. Our clients range from those which focus on one country to those with a global customer base.
Whether a consumer or a business, customers are demanding seamless financial transactions and experiences, and a new generation of FinTech providers are eager to provide them. Digital challenger banks, lending platforms, payment service providers, digital wallets, cryptocurrency companies and data aggregators are all changing the financial services sector. Technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and robots are driving innovation in the sector in new ways.
We help FinTech companies across the entire financial services value chain determine how to create new products and services. We are experienced in working with entrepreneurial and growing businesses which are disrupting their markets. This experience gives us an understanding the issues which are common to FinTech businesses such as managing rapid growth and developing an international approach from the start.
Our projects for FinTech clients have included:
Market analysis and value proposition design for a digital disruptor entrant.
Pricing strategy for new digital banking features and integration with traditional banking products.
Messaging and web site copy for an online lending platform.
Branding and characterisation for a financial services comparison site.
B2B sales collateral copy and design for a customer identification and scoring start-up.
Henderton helps banks, consumer creditors, card issuers, e-money services providers, peer-to-peer lenders and platforms, insurance companies, asset management companies, and payment system providers.
Our approach to working with clients is aligned along the following areas of expertise:
Market opportunity: market sizing and analysis of historic and forecast trends across financial services.
Growth strategy: market research and opportunity assessment, business analysis and go-to-market strategies.
International market positioning: customising propositions for local consumer tastes and market conditions.
Value proposition design: proposition differentiation and value-based pricing and sales approaches.
Brand and digital marketing: brand positioning, content and digital marketing.
Digitalisation: designing and implementing digital roadmaps, and the levers to build digital ecosystems.
Omni-channel and customer management: channel mix, tailor-made commercial solutions for clients, and better management of the customer life cycle.
Service and distribution: integrating customer information across channels to improve customer experience, and use of mobile technology to extend reach and improve customer loyalty.
Analytics: behavioural analysis to reduce churn, identify up-sale or cross-sale opportunities, customer lifetime value based on expected life-cycle contribution, and advanced customer segmentation which groups customers based on various factors, including behavioural predictions and customer-scoring assessment.
Buy and build strategy: validating and developing buy and build strategies to acquire scale and capabilities within relevant markets.
Internal audit: fully outsourced and co-sourced internal audit services for either specific areas or across the organisation.
If you would like to learn more about our experience, please contact our Financial Services team.
We support our clients internationally and have conducted numerous highly successful financial services engagements in many countries. These projects include:
New market entry for a neobank entrant: market analysis and value proposition design for a new direct bank in Germany, covering consumer research, market and competitor analysis, business case, best-practice analysis and differentiating features.
New market entry for payments: analysis of the European consumer payments market for a leading Eurasian payments provider, covering digital infrastructure, current and future market sizing by country and addressable market (including breakdown by cards, digital wallets, ACH and cash / other), and competitor profiles.
Greenfield credit card market entry: creation of a market entry strategy for credit cards for a bank in Hungary, covering strategic objectives, target segments, partnership approach, proposition and operational platform.
New credit card product launch: created a new mass proposition for a bank in Ukraine, including business case, consumer research, new name and logo, positioning and pricing, marketing, sales materials and review of operations to support the increased volumes.
Customer and revenue management: undertook a review of the Russian credit card business, covering all aspects including product range, pricing, portfolio management, operations, risk, marketing and sales to provide a scalable platform for future growth plans.
Customer management: primary banking project comprised diagnostic reviews and recommendations by bank, covering competitive analysis, customer segment penetration and cross-sales techniques.
Organisational redesign: created the design for a stand-alone card business across a regional retail bank to separate cards as a line of business to enable cards to operate as a business unit with its own P&L. Defined the card growth and capabilities agenda, prioritising high-impact projects into a medium-term plan.
Operational improvement: conducted a review of the Risk and Collections functions in Bulgaria to reduce delinquency on the credit card portfolio.
Acquisition due diligence: supported the due diligence on Polbank EFG for credit cards and loans. RBI then acquired 70% of the bank for €490m.
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Henderton acts as independent, trusted advisors to innovative companies throughout their growth lifecycle.
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