PRi
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Pensions and Retail Investments
The ‘Life & Pensions’ market in the UK has been on a journey which renders it almost unrecognisable from previous ‘analogue’ generations. As the pensions and retail investments sector continues to converge with asset and wealth management, we believe it is vitally important to both understand the heritage and nuances of this segment, whilst leveraging Alpha’s leading expertise to our clients.
How we work with clients
We bring our deep knowledge of the Pensions and Retail Investments market, allied to Alpha’s existing asset and wealth management capabilities, to co-create solutions to your key challenges, including:
Our work includes:
- Market participation strategy. Helping you to define where to play, how to win, and how you can differentiate in the competitive retail market
- Distribution transformation. Deep-dive assessments of distribution effectiveness, operating model and alignment to corporate value creation
- Platform transformation. Leveraging our market leading skill in the full spectrum of investment platform implementation, integration and transformation
- Cost optimisation and outsourcing. Bringing our extensive experience and industry-leading benchmarks to ensure that the costs of your organisation are allowing you to compete and win
- Bringing digital into the organisation. Not everyone is convinced by digital. We help make the case and define a strategy which aligns to the broader business strategy
- Redesigning the client experience. By defining personas, processes and journeys, we help businesses deliver a full omni-channel experience
- Regulation. Helping you manage regulatory change from impact assessment to implementation
Why Alpha?
We understand your business and the Pensions and Retail Investments market, with deep experience from working both within the industry and consulting to clients across the market. Our specialism ensures that we will bring experienced consultants that understand your challenges and opportunities, to work alongside your teams and deliver rapid results.
Q&A with Dan Mahony, Head of Pensions & Retail Investments UK
Why are Alpha choosing to expand their focus to the Pension and Retail Investments market?
Alpha have been on a remarkable journey of market-leading growth in the asset and wealth management sector and Bruce and I are delighted to have the opportunity to further expand their footprint into the Pensions and Retail Investments market.
Alpha have built a reputation for creating a truly differentiated client experience with market specialism and delivery excellence at the core of the business. As the savings and asset management markets continue to converge, the time is now right for us to bring our knowledge of the heritage and nuances of the sector, allied to Alpha’s leading capability across Digital, Distribution, Transformation, Outsourcing and Distribution to our clients.
What are the key challenges facing this market segment?
The P&RI markets have been through a period of sustained disruption, driven both by regulatory change and changing customer expectations. The traditional ‘symbiotic’ relationship between providers and intermediaries also continues to fracture, as advisers look to move across the value chain into asset administration / management and providers launch their own retail propositions and tied advice arms.
Given these shifting market dynamics, it is essential for pensions and retail investment businesses to gain a closer understanding and more intimate relationship with their customers. Those firms that remain complacent about their distribution will leak market share to more innovative incumbents and new market entrants.
How can Alpha help our clients to meet these challenges?
We have extensive experience helping clients to transform all aspects of their business, from digital and distribution, through to operational efficiency, outsourcing and cost reduction.
We combine this track record of success with our deep and specific knowledge of the Pensions and Retail investments industry to deliver actionable advice and execution to our clients.
What are the key factors in successful transformation?
Successful transformation must have a relentless focus on the “why” and “what for” throughout its lifecycle. Too often large programmes of work get lost in the “how” and the process or mechanics of the change, forgetting what the initial reasons or desired outcomes were at inception.
This can manifest itself in many ways, from benefits leakage to over complicated solutions and large amounts of unnecessary work. We believe that one of the keys to successful transformation is to ensure that the business expertise is fully embedded in any transformation, in parallel with clear business ownership and leadership.