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Retail Banking

France’s retail banking landscape is changing. The domestic market demands innovative products and services and proximity to customers, while genuine growth opportunities are opening up abroad. Equinox Consulting helps clients navigate this landscape by delivering real-world retail banking know-how, from new product development to business process optimization.

Managing customer relationships, boosting productivity, and leveraging new growth opportunities

Retail banking continues to play a crucial role in bank profitability. However, retail banks must cope with a slate of new regulations — in areas including oversight, anti-money-laundering, and risk management — as well as the following three major challenges:

Securing a position in the domestic market
As retail banks adopt a multi-channel approach, they must invest profitably in their distribution channels and ensure that they are coherent. Branch offices, whose role in customer relationships was once questioned, are now considered pivotal to maintaining local ties. However, they must adapt to new customer behaviors, such as the desire to play a more proactive role in the customer-bank relationship. Therefore, the location of branch offices and the attention given to expanding a retail branch network are key factors for banks that wish to retain their competitive edge in this environment. Other key factors include sales force effectiveness, the capacity to innovate, and effective customer segmentation.

Bolstering the productivity of banking and support functions
Important steps that a bank can take to bolster productivity include consolidating back offices, specializing services by business, outsourcing non-sales functions, and cutting costs.

Locating new growth drivers
Retail banks have been forced to make substantial changes as a result of E.U. market integration, which requires complying with European Commission Directives, implementing SEPA, and coping with increased competition in already-mature domestic banking markets. Nevertheless, today Europe is the natural playing field of French banks. The recent wave of acquisitions that has swept across Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean has focused attention on issues such as business unit integration, process streamlining, resource consolidation, and knowledge transfer.

Identifying strategies and operational solutions to make banking businesses more effective

Banking strategy and marketing

• Strategic planning
• Multi-channel distribution
• SWOT and CRM analyses
• New product development and launches
• Retail bank branch office strategy

Operations consulting

• Audits and restructurings
• Business process reengineering
• Performance improvement programs
• Cost-based management
• Benchmarking

Project management

• Major project implementation and change management
• Merger support and outsourcing

IT systems

• Systems and application selection
• Project management support

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Sample project

Implementing sales and management best practices.

A French bank launched an initiative to improve its sales force effectiveness across a nationwide banking network, and identified the sales and management best practices used by its top-performing branch offices. Our client’s objective was to roll the best practices out across the company.

Equinox Consulting was brought in to implement the best practices at a handful of pilot branches. We used the following three-step approach:

• Develop best practices guidelines for how to manage the branch office and support its employees through the change. The goal was to compile the most relevant practices and tools into handbooks for branch managers.
• Implement the best practices at around 50 pilot branches. This entailed helping the sales force apply the best practices at each branch, and making sure the best practices were operational and adopted by all employees concerned.
• Elicit feedback on the rollout. The feedback proved that managers had in fact adopted the best practices and were using the materials. Moreover, performance indicators tracked during the pilot phase showed the positive impact of the change on branch office results.

Equinox Consulting demonstrated the benefits of introducing standardized practices across a retail branch network and integrating them into the day-to-day activities of a 300-person sales team.

The success of this project prompted the client to roll out the best practices across its entire network – with the help of Equinox Consulting – in order to boost the selling effectiveness of tens of thousands of employees nationwide.