Often, the most effective and certainly quickest way to make improvement to the bottom line of a business is by adjusting its day-to-day operational performance.
How can Accourt help?
Accourt's consultants typically have substantial P&L management experience in the financial services sector. As such they are well-versed in driving day-to-day business performance. This real world experience can therefore readily be deployed to benefit our clients.
Key areas of expertise along with example projects are set out below.
Customer Acquisition & Retention
Accourt has specific and proven expertise in payments, including card systems, together with effective management practices and processes. These collectively are well placed to assist clients to develop effective strategies for:
- Customer Acquisition: we support clients to develop effective processes to identify appropriate target segments, as well as marketing campaigns to ensure effective acquisition
- Cardholder Activation: we assist issuers to ensure newly issued cards are activated and used, as well as identifying strategies for activating cards that have remained dormant for some time
- Usage: we deploy proven marketing campaigns that drive usage both domestically and in a cross-border environment
- Customer Retention: we provide effective segmentation strategies and techniques to enable financial institutions to retain and enjoy the strong revenues that are yielded from an effectively managed account base
- Loyalty Programmes: we work with financial institutions and retailers to provide differentiated loyalty solutions that are valued by cardholders whilst adding to the bottom line of the programme owners.
Performance Improvement
Because of our consultants' wide experience across major organisations in the payments sector, they are able rapidly to identify issues that are constraining our clients businesses, and to make practical and actionable recommendations for change. Areas of expertise include product management; risk and fraud management; payments processing; card issuing and acquiring; and technology management.
Examples
- For a leading provider of payments solutions and technology – Accourt reviewed the operational performance of an existing deployment which was regularly experiencing significant downtime; we made recommendations for changes both tactical/immediate and longer term to reduce the impact of, and ultimately to eliminate the performance issues being experienced.
- For a Tier 1 payments acquirer – reviewed merchant acceptance channels and interchange qualification process to understand current shortcomings; worked with the client to develop a better interchange qualification process to ensure transactions qualified for the best rate.
Process Design and Documentation
Through a logical and comprehensive approach, Accourt is able to capture and document existing business processes, and where appropriate identify areas for improvement or streamlining.
Example
- For a Tier 1 international payment scheme – documented in detail and created a core Service Level Agreement for a new mobile payment related solution. As part of this acted as primary interface for and managed engagements with key hardware providers as well as banks and other external parties.
Target Operating Model Design & Agreement
Accourt has significant front-line experience in organisational and operational design within blue chip organisations globally. This experience, drawn from P&L responsibility within major international organisations, ensures that Accourt is extremely well positioned to support clients in designing and operationalising fit-for-purpose and effective capabilities.
Example
- For two Tier 1 international retail banking groups – analysed and evaluated the pre-existing capability and then developed and implemented an efficient and effective target operating model. Once implemented, the new fraud management organisation structure delivered significant performance improvements and efficiency gains.