The most detailed write-up on a banking strategy study

Imagine a consulting engagement in one of the world’s most dynamic emerging markets: a literal gateway to an unbanked world. A Fortune 500 bank believes it has found a winning strategy to target consumers who subsist on less than $5 a day. The client is hoping they can capture up to 30% of this market, and push their revenue growth above the magical 10% threshold. In this market where 40% default rates are the norm, where literacy levels are well below 10% and where no formal banking channels exist, the bank is hoping, praying really, that the risk mitigation best-practices sourced from a joint-venture with Banco Azteca of Mexico will solve all their problems. The bank feels more than a little optimistic due to the significant profits of a 5-year pilot, begun in 2006, where they partnered with South Africa’s state-owned banks. The board has giddily, and greedily, given the go-ahead to end the partnership with the state bank and commit hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder capital to building hundreds of retail branches across the rural interior. On the eve of the rollout, concerns about communicating the strategy to certain vocal shareholders has led to the appointment of a team of management consultants to assess the strategy.

That is the setting for the retail banking version of “Succeeding as a Management Consultant,” for which the summary is now available. (Download here)

The book is based on a fictitious emerging markets retail bank which has hired management consultants to assess their planned micro-finance market entry strategy. It is a change on the original book, in that it includes over 200 excel models, videos, podcasts, and power point documents and data sheets. In essence, the reader can replicate the engagement as they read the book, and manipulate all the findings through the editable excel models, and then track the progress of the engagement via the power point documents, which are archived by work streams. We spent over 15 months developing this book to address all the constructive criticism, suggestions and advice we received on the original book.

Like the Public Sector version set in Sweden and released in December 2012, which served as a blue print for the retail banking book, we hired South African editors to check for local accuracy and details. We interviewed over 60 analysts, experts, government officials and consumers in the South Africa finance sector, local banks and the Treasury. We worked with MBA interns, over the summer of 2011, to develop hypotheses, structure the analyses and collect reams of data. We spend many late nights tacking storyboards onto our office walls, as we debated the analyses and structure. It was then a process of digging for the insights and thinking out how to best present the experience: how could we enable the reader to follow, understand, interact with and replicate this process?

The rest of the books in the series will follow the same format as the retail banking version, and we will soon release their summaries.

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