Industry: Retail banking
Ascentys worked with the mid market business unit of a leading South African retail bank to develop a set of strategies for each of their customer segments.

Ascentys was commissioned by a leading South African Bank to assist with the development of their mid market business units strategy. The client was facing tight deadlines and felt that an external party would be usefull in meeting these deadlines and in introducing new thinking.

The engagement was broken down into 2 phases being 1st to conduct a review of their strategy for purposes of validation, to identify strategy gaps and other potential opportunities that might have been overlooked. The 2nd phase was to help finalise the development of the final strategy. Ascentys used its “key strategy elements analysis” method to review the strategy to fulfill the 1st requirement. As a result we were able to identify certain gaps and provide preliminary inputs into the new strategy.

The project then continued into the next phase that consisted of refining and developing the new strategy into a final form. Ascentys worked with the client analyzing their strategy for each market segment and in a team based approach testing the clients thinking on key issues and introducing new concepts for consideration. This we achieved by using a fact based consulting approach combined with the use of innovation techniques.
The outcome was that a clear and concise customer management strategy was adopted by the Executive team. In this final strategy there was a shift in thinking from a product-profit related strategy to a customer -profit related strategy. Key revenue sources for the bank were identified and as a result  focus was shifted from acquiring market share in non valuable customer segments to acquiring market share in valuable customer segments. Customer profitability pools were identified and actions agreed upon that would focus on building competitive ability. These actions were designed specific to the key competitive dynamics in each individual customer segment