Industry

Financial Services

Banks, insurers and asset managers rebuilding cost bases and customer models under tighter regulation.

Looking straight up between dark office towers into fog

Engagements since 2021: 70+
Banks and insurers served in the last three years: 19
Annual cost savings identified for clients since 2021: $1.4B

Overview

We work with retail and commercial banks, insurers and asset managers on cost, growth, technology and mergers, in markets where margins and regulators leave little room for error.

Financial services is our largest sector by revenue, and the one where the pressure on cost is most constant. We work with regional and national banks, life and non-life insurers, and asset managers across North America, Europe and Asia, usually with the chief executive, the chief financial officer or the chief operating officer.

Our work tends to sit where cost, technology and customers meet: cost programs that do not damage service, branch and channel redesign, core system decisions, and the integrations that follow consolidation. We bring partners who have worked inside banks and insurers, and benchmarks drawn from more than seventy engagements in the sector since 2021.

What is shifting

The forces reshaping financial services

01
Net interest income is no longer doing the work
As rates settle, banks that relied on margin expansion are finding their cost-income ratios exposed again, and cost programs are back on board agendas.
02
Branch networks are being redesigned, not just shrunk
The question is less how many branches to close than what each remaining location is for, and how advisory, servicing and digital channels share the work.
03
Legacy core systems are now a strategic constraint
Product launches and regulatory changes take months because of platforms built decades ago. Replacement is expensive, but so is waiting.
04
Consolidation among mid-sized players
Regional banks and specialty insurers are merging to spread technology and compliance costs over a larger base, and integration skill is becoming a differentiator.

“We had been told for years that the only way to fix our costs was to close branches. Vertex showed us the cost was somewhere else entirely, and the board could see exactly where.”

Chief Executive Officer, a regional retail bank in the United Kingdom

Services