| Summary: | Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2002. === Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-105). === Trends change, companies grow, merge and folds, things occur at an unusually rapid pace and clients' expectations of services value and costs take new form every day. The information for this research was gathered mainly between December and April of 2002 and reflects the situation as it was that time. The biggest change of all to occur during 2001 and 2002 was the collapse of share prices in many sectors, the fall of Enron and Global Crossing, and SEC probe of the way investment banks link research to brokerage. This environment creates tremendous pressure on financial institutions to improve business operations, not through cost cutting measures, but through a critical review of the way services are delivered. Investment banks in particular, are under scrutiny to shift their strategy from product to customer centric. We identified 2 reasons behind the impetus for shifting strategies. First, the cyclical nature of the financial markets requires an unusual flexibility in deploying and folding strategic assets with minimum damage to operations. Second, the competition among financial services to attract High Net Worth Individuals keeps extending the core services offered to clients. As a result, financial services are taking high risks to change the way business is delivered in order to respond to client changing needs; the service has become driven by "clients' expectations for more and more services for less and less costs". This case study assesses how a financial services firm introduces fundamental change to the way it does business in an attempt to respond to new market pressures. The case analyzes to what extent strategy is aligned with execution and evaluates service delivery changes from the lens of the Clients, Financial Advisors, and Client Associates. The findings of the study are based on the extensive use of operation research, marketing, and management models. The use of system dynamics, service delivery, and gap models identified various factors critical for successfully implementing changes . The results of intensive field surveys offered valuable data for creating a decision support system to our recommendations. === by Bassim Halaby and Qunmei Li. === M.B.A.
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