Why is this important? Why is it happening? The retail investment market has been a lucrative space for many years, however over the last decade it has had its fair share of scandals. The key area of concern currently under scrutiny is the delivery of financial advice and the subsequent sale of financial products. With the current approach, financial advisers receive commissions on products provided to clients – a framework that can introduce a bias to the financial advice which is given. Product providers that offer advisors attractive commissions get favoured, very often steering advisors away from keeping clients’ interests [&hellip

by Michael Railton Challenges are just opportunities to think differently Offshoring has its horror stories. Many of them resulting from putting the desire to drive cost down ahead of the desire to deliver against business benefit. Throwing specs “over the fence” may be cheap, but there is often significant business upheaval in the wake of a poorly built software system. The cost of correction (in the software) and disruption (in the business) is often significantly greater than would’ve been incurred had a smarter approach to working as a team been pursued from the outset. Effective collaboration within distributed development teams is [&hellip

by Jacqui Newling, owner of our regulatory compliance service We’re helping many of our banking clients to effect the implementation of regulatory change. These programmes are extensive and complex. In order to help get our head around this, we took some time to reflect and identify key themes in these programmes. Taking a macro view allows us to consider how to implement these changes in a flexible and scalable manner. Our belief is that institutions that are setup to roll out compliance change effectively and quickly will be in a better position to focus on the business rather than the [&hellip

by Chuka Madukwe At the outset of every engagement, we spend time architecting the project to ensure that there is alignment between the organisation’s strategy, the proposed deliverable of the project and the approach to be adopted. Over the years, we’ve seen many, uhm, less than optimal practices across the industry. We decided to write them up in a “cheat sheet” for project architects. Project architecting for anti-progress Make roles and responsibilities unclear. In fact, why even consider them at all? Just assign people to the project and hope that they will get on with it. This way, the real “diamonds [&hellip

There’s been a lot of banter recently about ‘banking culture’, how it’s all wrong and it’s at the heart of many of the bank’s problems – particularly that of investment banks. The industry has become synonymous with society’s ills – greed, immorality, recklessness – and bankers are emblazoned in scandal. They’re responsible for everything from miss-selling insurance products to being conduits for money laundering and rigging Libor (or, if you like, Lie-bor). All of this comes in the wake of a financial meltdown. Caused by bankers. Saved by the taxpayer

BSG recently completed a challenging project stage at the world’s leading insurance market corporation. To maximise the learning on both sides, we facilitated a review session using Edward de Bono’s 6 hats approach. Here’s how we did it… BSG (UK) 6 hats project reviews from BSG (UK)

In the context of BA’s as agents of change, it is essential that there is clear line of sight between the organisation’s strategy and the change to be introduced by the project. The benefit(s) are the descriptions of what measurable improvement will be introduced by a particular change initiative. This tool helps identify (and track) traceability from strategy all the way through to the change delivered by a specific project. BSG (UK) Benefits pyramid version 1 from BSG (UK)

For the second year running, the UK International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) published the results of an industry-wide Business Analysis survey. For that same second time round, the BSG BA team, many of whom completed the survey questionnaire, reviewed the results and discussed some observations. BSG (UK) – Reflections on 2012 IIBA BA survey version 1 from BSG (UK)

Compliance related fines totalled more than $3.5bn in 2012. Financial sector compliance has moved from the business pages to the front page. LIBOR, regulations, capital adequacy, anti- money laundering and other industry terms are becoming discussed as regularly as last week’s football results. We’ve observed in many clients that when people speak about compliance it tends to be reactive – a problem has been identified and it needs to be fixed. Businesses tend not to see compliance in a strategic fashion as it has traditionally been a cost centre that has not contributed to the bottom line. A seismic perception [&hellip