Wholesale Bank Consulting and Strategy Services

Financial Institutions

In today’s uncertain environment, BCG’s wholesale banking consultants believe that reinvention is essential to creating value for wholesale banks. But continuing to use the same logic of previous initiatives will not be effective.

The wholesale banking business ecosystem faces numerous challenges and disruptions in its value chain—such as how to navigate an evolving regulatory framework, reduce costs, optimize capital, and develop sustainable finance and investing practices. To successfully cope with these new challenges, wholesale banks will have to reinvent themselves.

BCG has a proven record of helping institutions define priorities and implement new strategies in wholesale banking—with the aim of sparking innovation and value creation.

How BCG Supports a Wholesale Banking Reinvention Journey

Our solutions address fundamental elements of the reinvention journey.

Data and Analytics
We accelerate and capture profit potential by using advanced data and analytics in a proven change management approach to grow profit by approximately 15% to 20%.

Radical Cost Reduction
We identify the most relevant cost vectors, as well as those with the most impact, to go beyond tightening the belt to achieve a radical cost reduction of 20% to 30%.

Balance Sheet Optimization
We help clients develop a new dynamic capability to integrate stress testing with balance sheet optimization to support financial resilience and create a fortress balance sheet.

Sustainable Finance
We work with wholesale banks to define and implement their decarbonization ambitions, helping them drive sustainable impact through operating-model redesign, risk management, and solutions for their clients and their products.

Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is imperative to prepare wholesale banking for the future. We help clients identify the most effective levers of a digital transformation to drive significant profitability and guarantee relevance in the postdigital age.

Large Regulatory Tech Programs
Many wholesale banks have legacy IT architecture systems that are inflexible, hinder time to market, and incur increasing costs. Our specialists help clients choose the best structure with cross-asset functionality to meet their specific needs.

Meet Our Wholesale Banking Consulting Leaders

BCG’s wholesale banking consulting teams comprise industry practitioners; technology, data, and artificial intelligence specialists; and climate, finance, risk, and regulatory experts. These teams support banking and nonbanking institutions across the wholesale banking ecosystem on a global scale.

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BCG’s specialist research and benchmarking company provides deep insights into corporate and investment banking with diagnostics on technology, operations, risk and compliance, and market data.

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Our Client Work with Wholesale Banks

The impact of our wholesale banking consulting work includes the following:

Developed a large-scale agile transformation for a global investment bank with an expected impact of $200 million in three years, a three to five times faster delivery to market, a two to three times increase in productivity, and improvement in customer satisfaction and employment engagement.
Developed a one-year digital transformation program for a large bank in Asia Pacific that greatly improved its digital and sector solution capability. In the first month of the pilot, more than ten new strategic accounts were opened and ¥5 billion in incremental loans were approved.
Designed a revenue and risk tool for the sales field based on predictive machine learning models for a US commercial bank, providing more than 350 frontline staff with full transparency into their client books and equipping them with personalized recommendations for their clients. As a result, the bank expects to gain $30 million in incremental annual revenues, identify customers at risk of attrition 6 months in advance, and identify customers at risk of distress 12 months in advance.
Created a focused target client and product portfolio and a new target operating model for the wholesale bank division of a European bank. The effort produced a more profitable wholesale business with significant uplift in return on equity over five years as a result of reducing the cost of risk, achieving targeted growth, and implementing transformation levers. The bank’s share price increased significantly upon announcement, showing investors reward banks that are pro-active in addressing the long-term strategy of their wholesale business.