Industry: Banks operate within a challenging environment where they are faced with an increasing number of internal and external business constraints. Additionally, there is increased competition from innovative products as well as service offerings from startups that are disrupting the brick and mortar industry. In addition, regulatory bodies have enacted stringent regulations that govern and increase the transparency of the industry’s everyday business activities. Client: ABC Financial (“ABC”) is a 75 year old, large, publicly traded U.S.-based global bank that has over $20 billion in annual revenues and $250+ billion in assets. ABC has traditionally specialized in institutional banking services with goals of expanding its wealth management and retail banking foot print. Issue: ABC has been deeply impacted by the changing regulatory and macro-economic environment. These changes have motivated the company to assess how it operates within this larger context. ABC has several options to transform and is seeking to prioritize its organizational objectives. Transformation Strategy: The CEO is considering the following options as ways to assess and improve the performance of the company. 1. Efficiency: Analyze the bank’s current state to understand its challenges and to redesign processes and technologies with a focus on sustainability, flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. 2. Growth: Identify new growth areas (e.g., new products or regional expansion) to increase revenue and profitability. Additional Considerations: ABC has gone through numerous mergers, resulting in outdated and siloed IT platforms that are incompatible with next generation products. Further, five years ago, ABC invested $25 million to create a new, cutting edge online web portal, which was built separately from the company’s legacy systems. ABC utilizes a dedicated IT and Sales team to promote the portal, but consumers have been resistant to migrate to an online-only solution, despite it being a lower cost option. In addition, software issues and bugs across all of ABC’s IT platforms have resulted in delays for consumers and issues with compliance reporting. Questions: Please review the questions below and prepare responses for your meeting. Be prepared to talk through your thought process as you developed your responses. 1. Based on the given information, what seems to be driving ABC’s desire to change? 2. How might the transformation options impact the people and processes at ABC? See next page for a summary of the instructions 2 For internal PwC use only, not for further distribution outside of PwC. ABC Financial is a fictitious company created for the purpose of administering a hypothetical business case scenario for recruiting interviews. ©2017 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership. All rights reserved. We are proud to be an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer. Key Points to Remember: • Your manager will not be able to answer questions about the client or the issues faced. Be prepared to discuss your thoughts based on the information provided. You may make assumptions regarding the situation presented. • Talk through your thought process as you developed your responses. There are no right or wrong answers. • As you meet with your manager, stay in role. However, as much as you can, be yourself. You are not expected to “become a different character.” • You may take notes on the paper provided and reference these notes during the meeting. Timing: • You have ten (10) minutes to review this background information and prepare answers to the questions. You will be notified when 5 minutes of preparation time remains. • You have fifteen (15) minutes to meet with your manager, discuss your answers to the questions, and answer any additional questions he/she might have.
