Profiles in Building Sustainable Partnerships: Branch-Advisory Networks
A large regional bank recently partnered with Red Rock to support the design and launch a major strategic initiative focused on serving clients more comprehensively. The new initiative would bring about several large changes to the bank’s traditional operating model and client experience.
Reframing the Challenge
After several preliminary consulting discussions with executive leadership and key project stakeholders, the decision was made to focus out three major initiative outcomes:
Clearly communicating the transformational nature of the initiative stared with a cultural shift for the bank. That shift would be from a “my client” to “our client” mentality regardless of the client’s initial engagement point with the bank. Evolving the internal partnerships and communication standards between retail, advisory, and the private bank was given the highest priority.
Many additional resources and products were going to be made available to best service clients. Pacing the introduction of resources and products in a manner which led to optimal adoption was extremely important. The original go-to-market strategy prioritized and delivered the new resources in three tranches throughout the year.
Building a planning-centric client experience focus on a full balance sheet approach to servicing relationships with a goal of tripling the penetration rate of clients serviced by both the retail bank and the wealth management division. This would be accomplished not via a referral program, but by a new total client engagement process.
Guiding Principles of the Engagement
Once the strategy was finalized, several guiding principles were designed to begin engagement.
Regional and branch management would be accountable for ensuring high communication standards, formal meeting protocols, and a commitment to the new total client engagement process.
Aligning the newly launched resources and products with the bank’s overall value story to help ensure highly sustainable adoption.
Focusing on the quality of relationship introductions and expansions rather than the quantity.
Executive Commitment
Once the guiding principles were established, the executive leadership team, in partnership with Red Rock, committed to:​
Create a formalized approach to internal partnership meetings and communication mediums.
Refine the current branch referral model to incentivize quality of relationship introduction and joint meetings.
Line of Business Execution
A year-long introduction of the new initiative was designed and delivered to support the top 100 branches in the network which included:
Drive a bi-weekly calendar of new internal partnership meetings focused on opportunity review and educating branch bankers on deeper discovery to identify potential wealth management prospects.
Deliver a competency certification program which allowed more highly certified advisors priority access to relationship introductions.
Design and deliver a more formalized client segmentation to clear up gray areas between retail advisory and the private bank.
