Financial services | CIL Management Consultants

Regulatory change, mistrust of legacy institutions and technology-led disruption are creating challenges for large incumbents in the financial services sector. This creates significant opportunities for entrepreneurial, capital-light businesses to take share and profit. We regularly help clients in the insurance, lending, wealth and asset management and payments industries to benefit and defend themselves from these trends.

We use our deep sector expertise to help management teams and investors understand industry changes and identify areas of profitable growth. Using analytical and evidence-driven methods to navigate this dynamic sector, we enable our clients to make optimal strategic decisions.

Our expertise We have extensive experience advising both management teams and investors in fast growing financial services businesses. We specialize in the following segments:

Wealth and asset management: alongside demographic and technological shifts, continual regulatory changes are disrupting the investment and wealth management industries. We help financial advisors, asset managers and investment support service providers to capitalize on the significant opportunities presented by this ever-changing sector.

Insurance: the insurance industry continues to navigate technological, structural and regulatory change. Evolving consumer behaviors are leading to more innovative approaches to providing insurance products and services. We work with businesses operating in all corners of the insurance market, including technology providers, brokers, underwriters and BPO businesses.

Lending: the historic low interest rate environment drove the lending supply chain to make efficiencies through technology and automation. Recent market volatility and the end of the ultra-low interest rate environment has created new opportunities for disruption. We support distribution-focused businesses, such as intermediaries, support services and technology providers, as well as lender-side specialists, to develop, test and implement value-creating strategies for future growth.

Payments: payments providers proliferate and compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace; identifying opportunities to deliver sustainable and profitable growth is critical. We help clients across the payments value chain, including ePOS, card payments, foreign exchange and loan servicing, navigate this dynamic landscape.

Our expertise We have extensive experience advising both management teams and investors in fast growing financial services businesses. We specialize in the following segments:

Wealth and asset management: alongside demographic and technological shifts, continual regulatory changes are disrupting the investment and wealth management industries. We help financial advisors, asset managers and investment support service providers to capitalize on the significant opportunities presented by this ever-changing sector.

Insurance: the insurance industry continues to navigate technological, structural and regulatory change. Evolving consumer behaviors are leading to more innovative approaches to providing insurance products and services. We work with businesses operating in all corners of the insurance market, including technology providers, brokers, underwriters and BPO businesses.

Lending: the historic low interest rate environment drove the lending supply chain to make efficiencies through technology and automation. Recent market volatility and the end of the ultra-low interest rate environment has created new opportunities for disruption. We support distribution-focused businesses, such as intermediaries, support services and technology providers, as well as lender-side specialists, to develop, test and implement value-creating strategies for future growth.

Payments: payments providers proliferate and compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace; identifying opportunities to deliver sustainable and profitable growth is critical. We help clients across the payments value chain, including ePOS, card payments, foreign exchange and loan servicing, navigate this dynamic landscape.

What we do Some of the ways we help our clients include:

Acquisition search and strategy: our teams identify and qualify targets, assess the rationale for M&A and collaboratively develop buy & build strategies for successful integration.

Communicating complex value chains: we regularly research, analyze and explain highly complex business models operating in multi-dimensional markets. We can communicate the value of different business propositions to audiences with or without financial services backgrounds.

Advanced market modeling: we build and leverage proprietary market models, allowing historic and forecast trend analysis across a myriad of sub-sectors, including those of varying sizes, degrees of complexity and with limited data availability. This helps build conviction in the scale and growth prospects of a market opportunity and the right strategy to successfully capitalize on it.

Assessing procurement trends and routes to market: we help clients understand intermediation value-add, disintermediation risk, and the digitization of financial product distribution and how these present opportunities and threats for market participants.

International market positioning: financial services market conditions vary between geographies. We help clients thoroughly understand local dynamics and regulatory environments, enabling them to react and adapt accordingly.

Assessing sources of differentiation: understanding a business’s performance and differentiation is key to driving growth and gaining a competitive advantage. We analyze both quantitative and qualitative factors to build a comprehensive strategy for sustainable differentiation, and how this can be maximized to achieve success.