Bancassurance
Realising the benefits of Bancassurance
Background
Our client is a major Financial Services organisation. Their UK operations include all aspects of Personal and Corporate Banking as well as the provision of general lines of Insurance and Life Assurance. Distribution is via an extensive retail branch network and an established direct channel of branded services. The Life business was established in the late 80’s with a view to pursuing a Bancassurance strategy, whereby non-banking financial service products including Mortgage, Life Protection and Pension products are sold to the warm and extensive client base. However, penetration levels have remained low despite the adoption of various business models over the years.
Consulting Assignment
Our client asked us to look at the business and help them with their objective of equipping career bankers with the ability to sell a full range of financial service products.
Key Project Activities
Analysis
We conducted a detailed analysis of the Banking and Life businesses including a review of strategic aims, structures, cultures, managerial processes, sales and marketing processes and staff competencies.
Feedback and Recommendations
Our analysis revealed significant opportunities in the following areas:-
- Alignment of goals, objectives and strategies
- Structural integration and simplification of reporting lines
- Cultural awareness and understanding
- Best practise managerial processes
- Best practise marketing/sales processes
- Employee motivation
- Staff education in terms of Financial Service products
Our recommendations included a series of detailed operational improvement strategies to address these opportunities.
Realising the Benefits of Bancassurance
Our client decided to operationalise the changes by communicating the findings in a learning forum and building the Bancassurance causal relationships, which had been evidenced in the analysis, into the ongoing business management process. The result was:-
- A case study reflecting the issues and learning points
- Development of a model of how the Bancassurance business process actually operated, utilising the “I-Think” business modelling software package. The model was designed to reflect the cause and effect relationships between the business variables, namely Strategy/Structure/Culture/Process/People, in a Sales Funnel environment. This Bancassurance model is interactive, participants can evaluate “What If” scenarios by varying the business mix and thereby formulate their plans for improvement.
Both of the above were used initially by the business management team at their offsite sessions on strategy formulation and then more extensively in the business as part of an integrated organisational learning approach.