Financial Services

Monitor addresses issues such as the breakdown of traditional integrated value chains, the development of focused new business models, and exploiting the opportunities for innovation created by e-commerce and online financial service businesses. We also help financial service firms manage through deregulation, consolidation, and globalization.

We help all kinds of financial services organizations see and seize the many exciting, dynamic growth opportunities in front of them. We work with our clients to understand and strengthen their customer relationships, enhance the customer experience, and build brand leadership.

Recent work has included assisting a prominent Asian bank with restoring its brand leadership and maximizing its competitive advantage in online banking.

Innovation Lessons from Kodak’s Failures

Larry Keeley January 18, 2012 Article

Larry Keeley, an innovation expert and partner at Monitor, explains how Kodak’s famous failure to enter digital photography quickly can be a useful lesson for executives looking to innovate now. He writes that a new form of strategic thinking, convergences, “gives leaders a deeper sense of the interdependencies that connect firms, products, systems and services in new ecosystems” and reveals emerging opportunities, typically at the junction of new technologies and customer behaviors.

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Improving Innovation Returns Through Business Model Innovation: Video Highlights

Geoff Tuff, Joe Zale, Brian Quinn and Helen Walters June 17, 2011 Article

In these video highlights from Monitor’s recent webcast, “Improving Innovation Returns Through Business Model Innovation,” Monitor thought leaders discuss how analytic tools can provide better decision-making insights to help executives vastly improve their innovation success rates and ensure their business model investments generate bigger returns.

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Delivering Measurable Results: The Path to Profit Improvement

Robert Browne, Josh Lee, Mike Standing and Lisa S. Thompson May 17, 2011 Article

Many companies experience cycles in which revenue growth and cost cutting alternate in focus. While these cycles are understandable, they often damage long-term profitability. In this article, Monitor's Robert Browne, Josh Lee, Mike Standing and Lisa S. Thompson present the Delivering Measurable Results approach, which helps firms escape these cycles of revenue growth and cost cutting by developing programs that can sustainably improve their margins.

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Growth at Work: The Benefits of Building Entrepreneurial Environments

Francesco Fazio, Joel Finlayson and Neil Pearse March 28, 2011 Article

The benefits of having an entrepreneurial culture are clear—it leads to more effective and loyal employees, higher levels of innovation, and faster reaction times, just to name a few. But entrepreneurial environments aren’t just for small start-ups in new markets—even large companies in existing business sectors can create an entrepreneurial environment by employing five key enablers, explain Monitor’s Francesco Fazio, Joel Finlayson and Neil Pearse in this article.

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Grow More Profitably by Integrating Marketing and Operational Choices

Thomas Nagle and Lisa S. Thompson September 7, 2010 Article

In this article, Monitor’s Thomas Nagle and Lisa T. Thompson explain how companies can create profitable business models by integrating marketing and operations decision-making. In choosing revenue sources that leverage their strengths, and defining elements of sales that cause functional costs to vary, companies find growth.

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Megacity Growth Strategy

Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Mark Pocharski June 12, 2010 Article

The world’s rapidly growing megacities represent significant opportunities for companies seeking new markets and justify a unique approach to an important source of potential growth. In this article, Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Mark Pocharski explain what it takes for companies to build winning strategies to take advantage of this growth opportunity.

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Back on Course: Sovereign Wealth Fund Activity in 2009

Monitor Group and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei May 17, 2010 Article

In a new report tracking sovereign wealth fund investments, Monitor Group and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei found that the funds had adapted to the global economic downturn by realigning investment strategies with long-term goals and pursuing joint investments to share risk.

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