Retail Banking

Retail Banks are continuing to grapple with multiple challenges – complex and diverging regulations, increased competition, legacy systems, disruptive technologies, and higher customer expectations.

The global financial crisis in 2008 can increasingly be put behind us, but its legacy lives on in the ensuing regulation, market sentiment, and investment returns. This has now led on to new questions, such as whether Banking returns on equity (ROE) can readily withstand the impact of an unexpected economic downturn? What will be the actual fallout from Brexit?

There is an increasing focus on Retail Banking operations as to how they can adapt to the changing environment, quickly, cheaply and effectively. They need to innovate more efficiently, re-consider the role of the workforce, better leverage talent, consider the emerging risks (such as cyber-security), transform their technology, and find ways to develop deeper relationships with customers in a digital world.

Indeed, today there is an increasing recognition that Digital Transformation has become not just a business priority but a business necessity. It is not an add-on, it is becoming the heart of the Retail Bank. How can this be delivered quicker? How do we manage the risks? How can we make it workable and scalable?

The opportunity is there for Banks to do less themselves and take advantage of industry utilities, technology innovators, and to use partners to support investment, reduce costs, deliver better services, and better protect their organisations.

At Hillbrooke we can help you seize the opportunity to leverage partners to deliver Operational Transformation and do more – bigger and quicker. We have deep-dive Retail Banking expertise from ATM Outsourcing, through optimising Shared Service contact-centre operations, robotising labour-intensive processing, through to delivering Digital Transformation. – Talk to us.

Challenger Banks

Challenger Banks and the so-called Neobanks, ‘digital mobile newbies’ are now well established in today’s Banking environment and the future looks bright. The movement may once have been considered a UK phenomenon, but today it has global momentum. New Challenger and Neobanks are being established across Europe, South America and the emerging markets – in particular China and India. This growth is equally reflected by further new entrants in established markets and the increasing funding for the current Challenger Banks highlighting the potential.

The Challenger Banks nimbleness, unencumbered by legacy systems and organisational structures, coupled with a more focused product portfolio has made a definite impact – with Legacy Banks treating the threat seriously albeit not always reacting as swiftly as they may choose.

The challenge is how to grow and scale effectively while managing changes in the regulatory environment, minimising overheads and investment cost, and developing deeper and wider relationships with your customers.

Leveraging a central Shared Services back office environment balanced with Outsourcing of non-differentiating and non-essential activities is one of the ways of delivering this efficiently and effectively. Further, there is the opportunity to use partners to minimise upfront investment, provide access to tools and capability, and even to expand the product portfolio – for example providing ‘white labelled’ credit cards, insurance offerings, and Asset Management services.

At Hillbrooke we can help you to continue to grow and differentiate while ensuring your middle and back office scale with you thus avoiding the growing pains. – Talk to us.

Investment Banking

Investment and Corporate Banking are reaching a key juncture. Following a period of unprecedented turbulence in Investment Banking and the Capital Markets in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the signs are now more positive with the potential for growth and increased returns. The regulatory tsunami, as it was once described, is starting to subside and following the implementation of MIFD II should become an ‘after-storm’ allowing focus to shift onto the ‘new’ business as usual.

The environment for Investment Banking enabling and advising on Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) looks more promising after a period of stagnation, with greater access to capital, increasing business cost pressures, and changes in market economics. The notable decline in initial public offerings (IPO) over recent years also looks set to change with the potential for the cost of borrowing to rise such that debt financing starts to become less attractive than issuing shares.

Investment and Corporate Banks need to continue to ramp up their digitalisation effort and re-focus on back-office inefficiency – especially where there is a heavy reliance on manual paper-based activities. Technology-enabled, front-end platforms should enable banks to cross-sell fee-based services to customers more efficiently. Where banks have pooled data into lakes, more needs to be done to analyse and turn this into actionable insight to drive cost reduction and revenue enhancement.

The opportunity to harness the potential in the FinTech arena remains ever present with the likely focus on three major areas going forward – Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (including Robotics and Cognitive Learning), and RegTech (technology focused on Regulatory Compliance). The expectations may be overhyped, not least for Blockchain, but the potential for these technologies to make a tangible difference in the future of Investment Banking operations is very real.

At Hillbrooke we can help you to address the deficiencies of the back-office and leverage the FinTech opportunity, enabling you to re-focus on differentiating your proposition and on growth. – Talk to us.

Asset Management

Asset and Wealth Managers are facing the challenge of adapting to a market environment that is evolving quickly to the point of revolutionising itself. This can be seen in changes to shareholder expectations, client needs, increased regulation and step-changes to technology that are re-shaping the business and how it operates.

The narrowing of profit margins is putting increasing pressure on Asset and Wealth Management companies exacerbated by the increasing customer preference for passive and low-cost funds and products. This coupled with the changing regulatory and tax requirements, means that operating costs are in particular coming under unprecedented scrutiny.

The focus is increasingly on doing more for less, streamlining operations, so rather than just increasing capacity, firms are looking to do things differently. This may be through leveraging technology, process re-engineering, or Outsourcing of middle and back office activity to contain costs and in some cases deliver step-change in cost reduction. This cost reduction will translate directly into improved competitiveness, higher investor returns, and increased profitability.

There is a further opportunity to re-look at product portfolios and leverage technology to deliver new products and customer experiences.

At Hillbrooke we can help you address the operating cost challenges through the application of technology and leveraging Outsourcing as a tool to make material savings and drive improved performance. – Talk to us.