Strategic Planning

Senior management at many financial institutions struggle with determining which budget requests to approve and which to postpone without materially impacting the business. Other challenges for senior management are items such as where do they stand compared to their peers and what initiatives will give them (or help them maintain) a competitive edge.

Assembling business cases for senior management approval to arm them with sufficient information to assess the operational risk of both engaging in major initiatives and the business opportunity lost by not engaging in them can be a daunting task. Knowledge sets that employees typically maintain do not contain as part of their day-to-day roles. BPA brings experience and information from which to adequately prepare sound business cases that get approved.

BPA offers extensive experience and skill sets to assist financial services firms in steering them from current state to an appropriate target state for operations and technology and outlining the benefits, challenges of adopting and lost opportunities if not adopted to provide the tools necessary for firms' to make sound business decisions based on facts for potential mandates. BPA help in building that bridge and comfort level to manage business decisions with:

• experience with developing strategic plans and performing operational reviews of people, process and systems against industry peers
• knowledge of current operations, technology and challenges other firms are facing in these areas
• ensuring cohesive business plans outlining future goals and objectives are clarified
• establishing technology blueprints mapping systems migration to serve those business needs
• industry knowledge on what business and technology goals are most easily achievable short term
• experience in prioritizing project sequencing
• identifying what can be done concurrently without incurring undue operational or project risk
• knowing what to establish as contingency plans, workarounds, and tactical solutions to keep the business going while the longer term solutions are being rolled-out