Financial Services

From banking and insurance to wealth management and securities distribution, Bain has dedicated financial services teams serving all major areas of the financial services industry. Our work draws on more than 35 years of experience in the field and the expertise of Bain's 5,000 professionals in the world's most important financial centers.

What we do

Financial services accounts for nearly 20 percent of Bain's work. We work with leading institutions in all major areas, including:

  • Asset management
  • BPO/data providers
  • Commercial finance
  • Credit cards/payments
  • Insurance
  • Retail and wholesale banking
  • Specialty financial products
  • Stock and commodities exchanges
  • Wealth management and securities distribution

Bain has deep expertise in financial services, but we also look beyond the industry and draw upon our capabilities experience. We tailor these offerings to the needs of our financial services clients to help them solve problems or pursue opportunities in many areas, including:

Our approach

We work with our financial services clients as partners. Together we develop clear, practical action plans, and support or run the implementation of those plans to ensure real and sustainable performance improvement. We have worked with leading financial services companies in many strategic and operational areas, such as:

Reducing costs and complexity to improve performance. Financial services firms that consistently marry greater efficiency with higher productivity in serving customers generate the highest shareholder returns. Bain works with leading services firms to strip complexity out of products and processes, and reduce costs as a way of bolstering or rebuilding margins.

Harnessing and sourcing information technology that is aligned with strategic goals. Today's financial services firms must have a technology strategy that's both sophisticated and efficient if they are to compete successfully. We help our financial services clients figure out how to best source technology and ensure that information technology is aligned with business growth objectives and delivers effectively on its promise.

Integrating acquired companies to realize the most value. Successful merger integration lies in a few, powerful guiding principles: Tailor the integration thesis to the deal thesis; integrate where it matters; and act with deliberate speed. We have worked with financial services firms around the world to integrate acquisitions quickly and accelerate the delivery of expected value. Increasingly, we support clients that absorb acquisitions in the developing growth markets for financial services of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Building customer relationships to drive organic growth. Customer trust in financial institutions plummeted during the financial crisis. We have worked with banks and insurance companies around the world to strengthen their customer focus in all their operations. We have redesigned processes at all customer touch points with the organization and installed feedback loops to ensure the voice of the customer is heard and acted on. Bain developed the Net Promoter® system—a tool that focuses companies on developing levels of customer loyalty that lead to growth—and pioneered its application in the financial services industry.

Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Client results
We share our clients’ ambitions. We work to understand their reality and deliver true results—focusing on strategic decisions and practical actions. And we align our incentives with our clients’ objectives, so they know we’re in it together. The results stories below are just a few examples of how we’ve helped clients realize, and often exceed, their goals.
Insights
We develop insights that work for our clients. Our approach and recommendations are highly customized and lead to practical actions. Below is a selection of our experts' perspectives on important issues—for our clients and their industries. Visit Bain Insights to read more.
Read more financial services insights
Our team

We work as an integrated part of your team, from frontline to C-suite, to deliver true results and make the changes stick. We have a core group of senior financial services-focused experts that we deploy across the globe.

  • Ed

  • Ed Lin

    Head of Bain's Global Financial Services practice

    Singapore

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  • Andrew

  • Andrew Schwedel

    Head of Bain's Americas Financial Services practice

    New York

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  • Gary

  • Gary Turner

    Head of Bain's Asia Pacific Financial Services practice

    Sydney

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  • Philippe

  • Philippe De Backer

    Head of Bain's Global Financial Services practice

    Dubai

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  • Paolo

  • Paolo Bordogna

    Head of Bain's EMEA Financial Services practice

    Milan

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