The Center for Financial Services Innovation, the nation’s leading authority on financial services for the underbanked marketplace, provides consulting services. Through its consulting offerings, CFSI works with organizations to design, develop, launch, and grow high quality products and services that improve the lives of underserved consumers while delivering positive results to the bottom line.
CFSI works to harness broad, long-term change throughout the financial services landscape by creating mutual benefit for both the underbanked consumer and the companies that serve them. Through CFSI’s consulting work, clients benefit not just from partnership with the leader in this space, but also from a shared commitment to success that far outlasts the duration of any single engagement.
CFSI is a Market Leader
Through engaging CFSI Consulting, companies benefit from the insight, connections, and credibility of an experienced team.
Defined Focus – focused exclusively on underbanked financial services, CFSI Consulting offers unrivaled domain expertise.
Mission-driven Approach – CFSI Consulting is committed to the long-term, measurable success of client organizations offering quality, sustainable financial services to the underbanked.
Specialized Expertise and Intelligence – CFSI has an extensive research function, generating unique and proprietary insights on the market, products and consumers, and providing valuable insights from strategy development to market execution.
CFSI’s Consulting Experience
With experiences spanning from enterprise strategy definition to working in the trenches launching new products, CFSI Consulting has a track record of serving a diverse client base at many levels.
- Top card issuer and retail bank – engaged CFSI to refine an enterprising underbanked strategy and advance efforts within target business lines.
- Top five retail bank – turned to CFSI for advice as the bank was reengineering its deposit product suite following overdraft rule changes.
- Global financial services technology firm – relied on CFSI to identify market opportunities and existing technology to allow its clients to offer innovative credit products.
- Growing prepaid provider – retained CFSI to design a new product combining small dollar loans and savings.
- Prepaid issuer – hired CFSI to develop its infrastructure to ensure its services delivered positive results for underbanked consumers while driving financial returns to their company.
- Nonprofit organization – secured CFSI’s services to integrate a financial capability framework into their existing programs for children and families.
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Tailored Consulting
CFSI Consulting engagements are designed around specific goals and opportunities. Consulting engagements may be limited to specific phases of the business lifecycle or may be organized to support clients from strategy planning through market execution.
Strategic Planning
The underbanked marketplace is a dynamic environment requiring careful strategy planning. CFSI Consulting helps to identify strategies and tactics that have maximum impact—both to an organizations’’ bottom line and the consumers served.
Enterprise strategy definition –Significant opportunity exists for different firms to engage the underbanked market, but defining a strategy that spans multiple silos and rallies internal champions may be difficult. Through a 360-degree view of the marketplace and excellent facilitation skills, CFSI Consulting brings senior leadership together to define, evaluate, and lay plans to execute an underbanked strategy spanning multiple lines of business.
Business strategy definition –Significant opportunity exists in serving the underbanked market. CFSI helps businesses and nonprofits identify opportunities to bring high quality financial services to the underbanked marketplace, facilitates business strategy planning, and leverages deep industry insight to quantify impact.
Industry insights –CFSI Consulting clients benefit from a deeper understanding of the market, key players, and complexities. With a 360 degree view of the underbanked financial services marketplace, CFSI shares deep domain expertise with clients wanting to enter or expand their market presence.
Custom research –CFSI has extensive experience as a researcher, as a commissioner of research, and advising clients on their own research projects. Through leveraging our proprietary research products, sourcing field research, or working with established research providers, CFSI helps clients get the most out of planned market research activities.
Product Design and Reach
Implementing products designed for the underbanked market can be a challenge. Product structures and providers are varied. CFSI guides organizations large and small through the steps necessary to bring to market products that are both sustainable and high quality.
Product best practices –What attributes define not just sustainable, but also high quality? CFSI is authoring a framework of clear measures of quality in serving underserved consumers. CFSI helps organizations design products and services that actualize this framework, having helped multiple organizations build and modify product offerings to be closer in line with standards for high quality.
Product design and evaluation –What features will be critical for success? Why hasn’t this product taken off like expected? Through applying knowledge of the underbanked consumer, product financials, and marketplace dynamics, CFSI guides organizations through designing new offerings and evaluating existing offerings to ensure that financial products—and the way they are delivered—meet high standards both for the organization and the consumer.
Landscape analysis –Where do consumers turn today? CFSI concisely summarizes the market landscape in which an organization does—or hopes to do—business. Through understanding major players, product structures, distribution strategies, and consumer preferences, organizations are better positioned to competitively differentiate their offerings and fully understand marketplace dynamics.
Environmental scan –As exciting and rewarding as the underbanked financial services marketplace is, it is critical to understand the larger environment in which products and services for the underbanked will operate. The environmental scan provides the insights needed to take these challenges into account. Through details on current hot-button issues, changes in the regulatory landscape, and an overview of successful and unsuccessful product introductions, organizations are well-equipped to consider messaging, missteps, and market dynamics as they introduce products to market.
Execution
CFSI provides expert resources to clients to complement their own teams, making sure to select the right partners and ensuring adequate staffing and plans to successfully launch a product. Working alongside our consulting clients, teams from CFSI not only have the background needed for a quality deliverable, but also have a shared commitment to a projects’ long-term success.
Industry introductions –Through the vast network of organizations that engage with CFSI, clients often turn to CFSI for introductions to industry innovators. CFSI makes connections happen by helping clients to better understand similar past experiences, speak with people who have decided on a slightly different path, and ultimately gather evidence needed to make a business case even stronger.
Supplier matching –Underlying many successful market innovations are technology providers or other companies that enable delivery of high quality product. Selecting—or even finding—providers that make good partners is fraught with difficulty. CFSI provides insight on vendor capabilities and their products and helps clients evaluate potential partners.
Impact analysis and evaluation –Some clients have already launched a product to market, and may be able to measure revenue or number of clients, but are unable to detect what real impact the product is having on consumers lives. CFSI helps organizations understand best practices and ways to measure impact and outcomes of financial products and services. Whether this is critical to measure given organizational mission, to justify return on investment, or to better understand customers, having solid plans for measuring the usage and impact of financial products is critical to success in the underbanked marketplace.
Project management –CFSI provides an extra set of hands when clients need to outsource market research, execute an RFP process, or require project management for implementing financial services products, and offers expert resources and staff willing to roll up their sleeves and work as part of the team.
| CFSI retains control over its ultimate agenda, its research and the various public positions it may take. Consulting clients have no ability to set or influence our independently-derived policy agenda and activities. CFSI will not accept consulting projects with clients who seek this as an outcome of the engagement. For more information, please contact Kimberly Gartner, Vice President, Advisory Services at kgartner<at>cfsinnovation.com. |
