Online Strategy Solution

The Client

The client, the retail bank subsidiary of an international financial services organization, provides a full range of banking services and a number of convenience products, including telephone and Internet banking.

The Challenge

The client had created a new extended online strategy. However, because it was hoping to improve its status within the parent organization, the bank decided to have an outside party examine and challenge that strategy in further development efforts.

The client asked BearingPoint to combine its U.K. business transformation methodology and its U.S. eCommerce methodology to help it create a strategy that bridges its overall business goals and its technology, allowing the client to consider its corporate brand in the identification of eCommerce opportunities.

The Solution

The BearingPoint team developed a brainstorming and workshop process that examined, challenged, and extended the client’s existing Internet strategy. The result of that process was an Internet strategy that included an ambition statement, a set of strategic objectives surrounding products, processes, technology, etc., and a set of potential revenue generating opportunities and corresponding go-to-market strategies. To generate this eStrategy, the team utilized the three-phase process described below:

• During the visioning phase, the team conducted brainstorming workshops and interviews to create an ambition statement and begin to generate broad ideas for potential opportunities.
• During the focusing phase, the team brought out the best opportunities and deepened the business case for each of them.
• During the convergence phase, the consultants acquired sign off from the client, affirming the ambition and the opportunities that it wanted to pursue.

A key client buy-in tool throughout the engagement was the workshop with guided brainstorming, prioritization, and evaluation. This enabled the team to involve more than 100 people, representing key personnel across all affected organizations, in the strategy development process.

Additionally, the team overcame the challenge of developing the business case for a currently low or negative profit industry (eCommerce) in a small client market (the client base was just one European country) by grouping each opportunity with a go-to-market strategy theme. The themes enable greater profitability by providing a joint strategy for a number of opportunities. Together the opportunities gain more profits, while sharing marketing and strategy development costs.

The Benefits

BearingPoint provided the client with ten potentially profitable online business opportunities and business cases to support them. All of these opportunities are consistent with an articulated online strategy, which is in turn consistent with the client’s overall strategy and its parent company’s overall strategy. When pursued, these opportunities will help to provide additional revenue to the client.