RDA
13
Retail Distribution & Advice
The Retail Distribution & Advice practice works across the investment and insurance value chain helping financial advisers, platforms and life & pension providers transform and grow their businesses.
Market leaders are recognising the need to drive their businesses forward and capitalise on future opportunities as they transform to meet the evolving needs of consumers.
Alpha FMC has dedicated capabilities to support organisations participating within the retail distribution and advice market and is well-placed to help drive transformation across the industry.
The team comprises ex-industry practitioners who have a deep understanding of these organisations and experienced consultants who have worked across a variety of clients and transformation initiatives in this market.
How can we help clients?
Five key focus areas:
- Strategy development
- Helping our clients establish their future vision and business strategy, identifying where to play and how to win in the retail market
- Customer experience
- Helping our clients understand their target markets, to build future-proofed solutions and services that are centred around the customer experience
- Proposition design
- Defining the core value pillars of the proposition and designing propositions that meet customer wants and needs
- Operating model & optimisation
- Designing the capability and operating models to deliver our clients’ strategic objectives and identify optimisation and improvement opportunities in the business
- Business transformation
- Supporting our clients to implement large scale and complex transformation, designing and implementing best-in-class technology models, and bringing digital into the organisation
Why Alpha?
Alpha has expertise across the value chain and experience in delivering the full spectrum of change and transformation initiatives, from strategy through to implementation.
Our consultants’ specialism, paired with deep technical understanding and industry knowledge and experience, ensures we successfully deliver results through understanding the challenges and opportunities facing your business.
What are some of the current hot topics in our market?
• Digitally enabled advice propositions – adoption of technology to enable the launch of digital and hybrid offerings. Consumers want access to digital channels and experience higher levels of personalisation, with educational content and information on their financial wellbeing at their fingertips.
• The guidance and advice delivery spectrum – a broader spectrum of offerings is emerging, enabling firms to identify where they can take advantage of the market opportunities and work to close the advice gap by providing access to the wider retail market.
• Operational efficiencies in financial advice – greater focus and investment in helping to reduce the cost-to-serve and reshaping manually intensive and time-consuming advice processes, through greater use of tools, automation and digital enablement.
• Retirement planning innovation – development of consumer-centric solutions that can meet the evolving needs of consumers into retirement with fit for purpose propositions.
• Consumer Duty regulation – FCA regulation on Consumer Duty, a package of rules and guidance intended to set higher expectations around the standards of care and focus provided on ensuring good consumer outcomes.
• Sector consolidation – continued merger & acquisition (M&A) activity in the industry, with increasing PE investment in the sector, as firms look to build a position of scale and drive value in the business.
• Building out retail financial services (FS) ecosystems – the next evolution of vertical integration, with large retail players looking to address multiple consumer needs through a retail waterfront, helping consumers with a breadth of solutions and service offerings.
• Unlocking distribution opportunities through intermediaries – as the industry is evolving and changing shape, firms are finding it challenging to connect with and distribute their products and solutions through intermediaries and corporate partners, with a higher risk of ‘lock-out’ for product providers.