Wholesale bank strategy re-alignment for growth

Client need

A leading global wholesale bank needed to increase its market competitiveness by re-defining and implementing a differentiated growth strategy. This required significant leadership alignment, increased collaboration across regions, products, and functions, and faster execution. To increase competitiveness, leadership needed to rewire old mindsets, lack of clarity and siloed ways of working that were limiting their edge in the market, and build a performance culture grounded in enterprise value, feedback, and accountability.

Solution

BTS partnered with the head of the bank and the leadership team to design and deliver a structured engagement through a series of leadership off-sites, strategy definition sessions, and high-performance team experiences across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas to rapidly align, commit to, and execute the new strategy.

The work focused on:

• Co-creating the wholesale bank’s must-win battles and driving their activation and translation to the country, product, and function level.
• Resetting performance culture through a growth mindset, "brave spaces," and a sharper competitive edge.
• Creating a blueprint for high-performing teaming, with a consistent approach and language across the organization.
• Systematically removing key silos by tangibly strengthening collaboration and co-creation across the organization.

Through a series of assessments, practical tools, and focused application, leaders created joint ownership and commitment to the organization’s strategy, a culture of constructive conflict, stronger stakeholder engagement, and enterprise thinking, while defining new operating principles, ways of working, and must-win battles to accelerate execution.

Results

The partnership engaged more than 320 senior leaders globally and helped align teams around shared priorities, new ways of working, and enterprise-wide collaboration.

Key outcomes included:

• Joint ownership of defined regional strategies and cross-functional workstreams across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas.
• Year-on-year improvement in the EMEA Leadership Team's High-Performing Team Assessment (HPTA) scores across every facet .
• Increased alignment between country, product, and functional leaders .
• Leadership team meetings were redesigned for greater focus on collaboration, co-creation, and feedback; "corridors of cooperation" were established to share best practice across WB regions .
• A shift from "safe spaces" to "brave spaces" that encouraged constructive challenge and accountability, driving breakthrough client solutions and competitive wins

Testimonial

"This group has never come together in one room to align on an EMEA set of priorities, tradeoffs, or commitments."

‍