Making a practice out of it..

With TARP repayments having started in earnest (see Tarp Transaction Reports), we are having many discussions on building a “banking practice”. Almost as many as we did 18 months ago on people wanting to start “KPO”, and that’s a bit of a relief. You see, it’s hard for an outside consultant to know what KPO one refers to, since clients really don’t have “KPO” processes.  They have customer acquisition, product design and distribution, product servicing, risk management and settlements. Some of these processes involve voice, some involve data entry, but all of them involve an understanding of the business, and therefore some degree of knowledge.

Within the ambit of a “banking practice”, the issue is somewhat reversed. There is the investment bank, the commercial bank and the retail bank. There are asset products, liability products, trading products, payments products and advisory products. Then there’s a front, middle and back office for each of these. Banking consists of a wide variety of practices, actually. So there are no clear cut answers. Yes, there are flavors of the month, and yes, us consultants do read the same reports from Gartner and Forrester, but no, it’s not our job to fob you off with generalities. A personal source of depression for me is to go through RFP responses to clients from a variety of service providers. There is no way to decide contract awards from the documents because there is no differentiation other than the quality of grammar. One of the fallouts of our attrition rates, is even the diagrams in these documents are similar, if not identical. Sharing the same platitudes and cookie-cutter synopsis of analysts across clients will not help differentiation, and that’s one of the keystones of a successful practice, banking or KPO.

Here’s the best short answer that I can come up with, in isolation. What you should do should depend on what your firm’s capabilities are and what your firm’s market access is. Maybe we are old fashioned, but sticking to the knitting is a great way to expand. The trick is to stay with process adjacency. The beauty of process adjacency is that you can, over time, expand the scope the processes to any direction, as long as you follow the discipline of looking at the next adjacent process in the direction you want. We’ve guided providers from customer service to account maintenance and there on to account opening as a means of opening the client acquisition niche. Others have gone from customer service to payments and thereon to securities processing. Still others have gone from sales to application processing to credit models and underwriting.

This doesn’t happen in isolation however. To help you, we need to understand you, the service provider and your operating model, where the competency clusters are, and then extend these out to create a logical product offering. Depending on the starting point, this may be a horizontal offering (say risk, and yes that is a flavor of the month), or banking product specific (say securities processing, another flavor). These in themselves are wide areas, so the initial expansion may be in pre-settlement processing, or fund accounting, or client acquisition. The key is, it’s a wide enough market out there for the offering to fit in with your cluster competence, and if properly thought through, still be immensely profitable.

Productization is not easy. It is far less expensive than most believe, but it takes strategic intent and a willingness to invest time and effort. It is necessary to test the validity of the scope with the market. Therefore your access to potential anchor clients becomes a key success factor. Understanding the depth and breadth of your conversations with the market, helps to hone the list of potential clients to create a more robust offering. As entrepreneurs, we understand the value of investment dollars and want to help maximize profitability by building in check points during the product (or practice) development life cycle. These checks cannot be built from an ivory tower. To get to product profitability within a reasonable time frame, it becomes important to know who you can talk with early, and then help raise the pitch of that discussion. We need, therefore, a sense of your market access.

So please, work with us. Yes, we can give you the flavor of the month, but that does not make a successful, sustained practice. We need more than the latest Gartner report to set you up for success.

(More information on product selection methodology)

(More information on product portfolio workshops)