Digital disruption continues to have a major impact on companies throughout the insurance and financial services industries as traditional players grapple with meeting client expectations for a faster, more transparent and tailored customer experience enabled by digital. Lotis Blue helps insurers, financial data and infrastructure, and technology providers to assess and improve product and channel effectiveness, build the infrastructure and environment for innovation, and transform what they think and do to better position themselves for success.
We’ve partnered with leading brands in the financial services industry, including:
Common Strategic Misalignments in Financial Services
Misalignment of Strategic Goals and Daily Work
Many large financial organizations have employees that express, “I don’t understand how our company strategies relate to my work.” This indicates a disconnect between strategic goals of the financial institution and day-to-day operations. These communication gaps often lead to inefficiencies and confusion, hindering the organization's ability to adapt in the ever-changing market conditions of the financial services industry.
Poor Prioritization and Workload Management
Another common issue heard in the financial services industry is the difficulty employees encounter in prioritizing initiatives effectively. This often leads to sentiments such as, “Our workloads are consistently increasing, and I don’t know what is most important.” This reflects a lack of cohesive planning, where new strategies and tasks are added without prioritizing existing ones, causing frustration and burnout among financial services employees.
Not Capturing Full Value of Technology
IT systems are the “factory” that financial firms run on, but many times the value of these systems are not realized by firms. Lotis Blue has experience with designing processes and identifying implications of processes on IT systems that help you get the most out of your technology investment.
Difficulty Managing Inorganic Growth
Buying another company is a proven approach to growing top and bottom-line performance, but integrating acquisitions can have many pitfalls - and poor integration will dilute some or even all of the desired synergies. Lotis Blue has extensive experience helping clients with due diligence and integration of acquisitions across a range of sizes and businesses.
Five Key Principles for Effective Strategy Alignment:
We develop a strategy map, specific to financial services organizations, to address critical questions and an execution plan to turn strategies into tangible results. Regular planning helps achieve lasting financial services transformation for the organization.
Clear accountability ensures that financial institutions deliver on their objectives by emphasizing shared responsibility and aligning goals and initiatives with strategic objectives. This fosters a culture of ownership and ensures the consistent business performance crucial in the often turbulent world of financial services.
To ensure lasting change, we promote continuous alignment around strategic priorities, preventing investments in nonstrategic projects that divert resources. By fostering an aligned and transparent organizational culture, we help maintain focus on core objectives for the financial services organization.
We take concepts from methodologies such as Agile and organize the program around short sprints which are linked to specific measurable outcomes and collectively make adjustments to the plan as more information is learned and pivots are needed.
We engage both senior leadership and front-line workers in the transformation.
By addressing these challenges with a tailored approach, Lotis Blue empowers financial services organizations to navigate disruptions and achieve their strategic goals. Our strategy alignment methodologies ensure that every level of the organization is engaged, prepared and equipped to thrive in an ever-changing financial services industry.
Aligning Strategy and Structure in Financial Services
In financial services, organizations that are overly complex, have capability gaps, or lack a strategic edge risk falling behind. Adaptability is the antidote to these risks and at Lotis Blue, our financial services experts specialize in empowering our clients to create more agile organization structures.
Our approach to addressing overly complex organizations includes an operating model diagnostic and redesign that prioritizes strategic capabilities, clear roles and accountabilities, nimble decision-making, and an efficient leadership structure. By employing these tailored solutions, we guide organizations through their unique transformation efforts. Our goal, always, is to support our clients in building a strong organization that can execute strategy, anticipate market changes, and deliver long-term goals.
Embedding Lasting Transformation
Once a solid strategy is in place and the organization structure is designed to support it, the last outcome leaders want is for change to fail due to inadequate change management. We embed new ways of working that deliver effective change management through methods grounded in behavioral science. We pinpoint the specific strategies necessary for successful change adoption, crafting a detailed blueprint that includes:
Creating Confidence and Clarity
We link the vision for change with a clear design and execution plan, defining how the organization must operate differently to capture the expected value of change. By creating a clear roadmap, we build confidence and ensure everyone understands their role in transformation.
Addressing Psychological Needs
Successful change hinges on addressing the unique psychological needs of those employees that make up the organization. Those needs will directly impact whether the change is embraced or rejected. Lotis Blue tailors change management tactics on both group and individual levels, conducting in-depth stakeholder analysis to anticipate barriers to success. We focus on building a supportive environment that encourages buy-in and engagement throughout the organization.
Establishing Common Governance
To ensure alignment, we create an integrated transformation office infrastructure that manages change execution, planning and risk management across the organization. This common governance structure aligns all facets of the change process, ensuring seamless integration and sustained progress.
By instituting change acceleration processes, Lotis Blue empowers companies to mitigate disruptions, bolster employee buy-in, and streamline the journey toward reaching long-term objectives. Our comprehensive change strategy goes beyond implementation, focusing equally on sustaining and optimizing change to engrain new ways of working within the company’s culture. Our financial services expertise allows us to collaborate effectively with clients and to facilitate ambitious transformation efforts.
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