Quarterly CI Reviews in Financial Services

Our client is a multinational investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Switzerland. Co-headquartered in the cities of Zürich and Basel, it maintains a presence in all major financial centres as the largest Swiss banking institution and the largest private bank in the world.

A key strategic objective for our client was to drive simplification across its business to enable more focus on delivery. In order to achieve this, we needed to build momentum and focus across the team. We had already delivered Lean Six Sigma training across their teams to build internal capabilities; so we were keen to build upon this and demonstrate tangible benefits and outcomes from the training, giving everybody an opportunity to put into practice their new skills and tools. In order to truly embed the principles and methodologies, Lean requires a ‘Learn by Doing’ approach; therefore we wanted to orchestrate a way to optimise this. We worked with our client to look beyond short-term ‘wins’ and establish a solution that is sustainable in the long-term. By creating a regular cadence and applying focus on ‘continuous improvement’ as part of everybody’s day jobs, a positive culture could be born.

We established Quarterly CI Reviews, a working system of capturing day-to-day improvement initiatives and provide independent assurance and measurement of improvements so that our client had something to celebrate and be proud of throughout the year. We developed a framework to capture and manage all simplification ideas. This consisted of a register of improvements and a dashboard that provided full visibility of improvement initiatives throughout their implementation lifecycle. We set up quarterly workshops where we would review progress, celebrate successes and look to share best practices across departments. These reviews encouraged and demonstrated the benefits of simplification initiatives that drove efficiency, profitability, sustainability and enhanced customer experience.

Within the first 6 months, we identified over 70 simplification ideas, generating savings of over £200,000 and a time saving of over 3500 hours.

This is an ongoing subscription service that we provide for our client. Find out more here.