Ian Wachters
Managing Director & Senior Partner
Amsterdam
Ian Wachters joined The Boston Consulting Group in 2001. He is a core member of the firm’s Financial Institutions and Insurance practices. Ian leads BCG's financial-service pricing team as well as the firm’s pricing-enablement centers in Europe.
Ian’s main focus is pricing, where he has deep background and expertise. He also has extensive experience in wealth and asset management—having worked with private banks, asset managers, insurers, and pension funds—and in managing large transformations and postmerger integrations (PMIs) in banking.
Much of Ian’s recent client work for BCG has taken full advantage of his knowledge of pricing for banks and insurance companies. This includes pricing of current account propositions, pricing in investments, pricing in small- and medium-size enterprises and corporate loans, pricing in motor insurance, and the building of pricing capabilities.
His broader banking experience covers strategy development, PMI, cost reductions, and sales force effectiveness in retail, private, and commercial banking. For insurance clients, he has worked on corporate strategy in life and nonlife, organizational topics, and “bancassurance” sales-force effectiveness.
Before joining BCG, Ian worked for seven years for Royal Dutch Shell, most recently as a European marketing adviser. He was responsible for the business development of specialty-oil-product sales in several European countries. He also worked as a B2B marketing manager for oil products in the Netherlands and as an IT consultant and project manager for Shell International. He has contributed to many BCG reports from the Financial Institutions practice.
Following the lead of successful B2C service providers in other sectors could generate improvement as high as 10% to 15% of current daily banking revenue.
Today’s leading firms achieve stronger revenue growth by treating pricing as a capability they can adjust in response to varying client needs.
To bolster profitability, banks are designing and deploying smart pricing that reflects the value of trade finance to their clients.
European banks have struggled since the financial crisis to make the business pay. Better pricing could provide the revenue boost they need.
By ensuring that their relationship managers account for customers’ price sensitivity when setting target prices, commercial lenders can increase revenues by up to 10%.
Superior pricing capabilities offer a potential revenue windfall for retail banks caught in the industry’s crossfire of slow growth, heightened competition, price-conscious customers, and regulatory change.
