Lean Horizons Consulting | Industry Expertise

Unlocking Value in Financial Services

The Financial Services industry has, in many ways, been at the forefront of the flat world economy. As many of the barriers that once defined service segments and geographies recede, a new world is open; a world offering the potential for unprecedented growth but also offering global competition and global commoditization. The technology-driven democratization of market access has put a radical and unceremonious end to the traditional means of conducting business across Insurance, Banking, and Credit Operations. Woe to the slow or the hidebound as the new world consumer is offered a dizzying array of innovative financial products and services. The truth is it’s their market, not yours. Brand loyalty? Think “erosion.” The new reality is that Generation X and Y – your future customers – may have stronger, ongoing relationships with their telecom providers than with you. Against this competitive backdrop is the associated, headlong rush for market share; there have been casualties, spectacular casualties. There will be more. Moreover, few other industries have invested so heavily in information technology and business process outsourcing only to have the players find themselves in a competitive position that rather resembles where they began. Some have paved cow paths; others find their external scan to be eerily familiar, be it viewed from New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore or Bangalore. Seems everyone got on the bus.

So, what now? How does a financial services enterprise differentiate itself and compete-to-win in the new world order yet retain and apply the essential governance and strategic judgment that have underpinned its success? Lean offers a way. At its essence, Lean is about velocity under control; the velocity of sustained value creation focused strategically and tactically upon the customer. Simple. Radically simple. Prudently simple.

The principles of Lean are all about relentlessly removing waste and variability from business processes; the waste that stands between you and your customer. The tools of Lean and Six Sigma make the wastes visible and enable ongoing removal not by fly-in-fly-out domain experts but by your own people. Therein lies real competitive advantage; an organizational culture relentless in its pursuit of perfect, waste-free customer focused service, embracing quality, liberating capacity and driving service velocity to levels thought unimaginable.

Our place in the world of Financial Services

We have partnered with some of the world’s leading Financial Services providers to deliver the benefits of Lean to their enterprises. We’re not about the clumsy force-fit application of factory Lean to the administrative environment nor are we proponents of kaizen-in-a-box. What we deliver is principle-driven enterprise transformation. Drawing upon the extensive, business leadership experience of our team, we align Lean and Six Sigma with your purpose. It’s a crucial distinction. When employed the way they should be – strategically and organization-wide – your business benefits maximally. Your cross-functional teams apply Lean to create velocity, eliminate wastes, and synchronize flow in value streams focused on your customers. Six Sigma builds upon these gains by understanding, reducing and managing process variation within those value streams. The combination is powerful. Your people’s sights are expanded and raised far above the internal. Through this modern view, your team members are able to think differently about how the value of service is achieved and how your business is done. They advance the activities and interactions that add value – and reduce the ones that do not. Enabled by education and tools, your teams reduce response time in all things, discovering and correcting problems before they impact your ability to serve. The underlying drivers of inefficiency are identified. Queues around information hand-offs, of backlogs, of waiting recede. Simplified, reliable, synchronous processes spanning your total value stream expand your capabilities and, critically, the competitive agility of your business. In parallel, the costs of process waste reduce system-wide, resulting in year-after-year gains in capital productivity and free cash flows supporting reinvestment, enterprise value and shareholder reward. By applying Lean broadly, you improve effectiveness throughout the value stream and develop integrated solutions that answer not only the operational, but the strategic and organizational challenges, as well. You design your system for sustained growth and the continuous delivery of best-in-market service performance integral to best-in-market business performance.

Critically, it’s not just about the explicit tools of Lean and Six Sigma. It’s also about sustaining a culture that is defined by leadership. Our people – your coaches – have experienced the successes – and the mistakes – capturing learning to benefit your business. We work with your teams to avoid the pitfalls and dead ends, to overcome the frustrations of change and build a confident culture committed to continuous improvement supported by sustained results. In doing so, we reduce time to value on your Lean Six Sigma investment. We look forward to partnering with you on your journey.

Summary of representative results:

The following table provides representative results from Lean client collaborations.
Metric	Improvement (%)
Processing (Cycle) Time	60 to 300
Customer-Experienced Lead Time	40 to 90 reduction
Same-Day Turnaround of Offers	50 to 200
Employee Productivity	50 to 300
Internal Quality PPM	50 to 95
External Quality PPM	50 to 200
Customer Satisfaction	50 to 75
Cost per Unit	20 to 60
Operational Expenses	20 to 45

		Other Areas of Industry Expertise
		Manufacturing

		Healthcare

		Private Equity

		Oil & Gas

		Biotech & Pharmaceuticals