Project Background
As part of an ambitious restructuring in 2020, a market leading investment bank’s Prime Brokerage division approached Monticello Consulting Group to support the design and build of a merger of their two key business entities. The goal of this ambitious effort is to optimize redundant and inefficient processes to achieve significant operational costs savings and accelerate services innovation. Strategically, the merged entities aim to offer new, differentiated, and competitive services to their clients. The target state infrastructure is being developed and implemented by the Monticello team across the next two years.
A Closer Look
Operationally, Monticello’s client recognized the need for a simplified structure to better monitor business growth susceptible to market volatility and to eliminate costly and redundant processes. The client envisioned a unified entity structure with best-in-class applications, streamlined business processes and increased automation across several international business locations. These strategic investments would accelerate time to market for client services and introduce cost optimization through application landscape unification, achieving a competitive edge over other large Prime Brokers.
Culturally, the client also realized how such a change could invigorate their organization and help them to connect more closely with their clients and ultimately attract new business. From an internal operations standpoint, the client also sought to improve employee engagement by challenging the team to deliver the highest level of quality to both internal and external stakeholders throughout the process.
How We Did It
By leveraging the Monticello Strategic Planning Playbook, the team guided the client through the initiation phase of the Prime Brokerage Simplification Initiative. Through research and analysis, the team began by evaluating all business areas impacted by the merger. Impacted business areas were then organized into sub-projects, which worked with business, operations and technology partners to define current state operating models, identify potential merger-induced risks, dependencies, and process changes.
Subsequently, as part of the planning phase, the Monticello team led stakeholder interviews and deep dive workshops to develop a two-year roadmap to roll out a new and transformed operating model for the merged entities. The Monticello team developed the communications plan and articulating business requirements, ensuring that the target state operating model complemented the business with standardized applications and processes, and assuring that the merged entities did no harm to existing processes.
Working in close partnership with the client, the team from Monticello:
Provided differentiated capabilities and best-in-class services for the client
Adopted a standardized approach to the application landscape, eliminating redundancy as part of the new independent global structure and minimizing development and integration costs
Leveraged existing technological solutions and enhanced capabilities that were tailored to the individual processes applicable to the business
Introduced a high degree of standardized and automated business processes
Stakeholder Management
Effective stakeholder management is critical to the success or failure of a project. Impacted functions included multiple teams across the front and back office and key resources from each were engaged for their knowledge of the workflow and kept involved and informed as processes were documented and milestones were achieved. Successful stakeholder management also helped to reduce risk. The more we engaged key stakeholders, the better our ability to identify potential risks and issues that would stand in the way of success.
Staying Agile
With a project of this size and complexity, our client and Monticello agreed on the importance of adopting an agile methodology in order to guarantee effective project execution and delivery.
What does that mean for the client?
Expertise with Agile Tools and JIRA to centralize and manage key project artifacts
Close partnerships with Technology to ensure that critical success factors are clearly articulated and business value is realized.
A deep understanding of sub-project and external dependencies, respectively
Neat and standardized 5 blocker status reports with a clearly articulated “path to green”
Rapid response to project or scope changes and practice of continuous improvement
What’s Next?
Once the new structure is finalized, the client plans on evaluating the component processes within the new structure, with the goal being to standardize and harmonize the prime brokerage business’ end-to-end delivery chain throughout its multi-year transition/implementation. Business units are expected to realize significant cost savings through the elimination of redundancies and from the introduction of new functionality spawned by the synergies of this integrated structure. Monticello continues to provide its expertise and knowledge as it partners with the client on its journey to a successful rollout of this truly collaborative project.
About Monticello
Monticello Consulting Group is a management consulting firm supporting the financial services industry through deep knowledge and expertise in digital transformation, change management, and financial services advisory. Our understanding of the competitive forces reshaping business models in capital markets and digital banking are proven enablers that help our clients remain in compliance with regulations, innovate to be more competitive, and gain market share in new and existing businesses. By leveraging our Digital Transformation and Change Management services, Monticello will help transform your business operations and cultural mindset to one where excellence takes center stage.