International business building for a global financial services institution (Silke-Susann Otto)

A team of a-connect IPs recently supported a global financial services institution to grow its international wealth management business. In the initial phase a-connect helped the client to prepare and conduct a strategy workshop to assess the attractiveness of selected markets and the fit of the client’s capabilities within these markets (customer base, distribution, etc.). Once the decision was taken as to which market to enter, a feasibility study was conducted in a second project phase. The objective here was to develop a viable business model, taking into consideration the regulatory environment in the market as well as client-internal capabilities and organizational issues. Based on the previous findings the team wrote a detailed business plan for the selected market in the third phase of the project that would enable the client to start setting up the operations immediately. This included developing a distinct value proposition for all target customer segments based on focus groups, defining effective distribution channels, deriving underlying assumptions for the financial model, building the model, identifying KPIs and defining the infrastructure requirements.