The productivity agenda

Moving beyond cost reduction in financial services

A variety of forces have put tremendous pressure on the financial services industry in recent years, leaving many institutions with unsustainable cost–income ratios. And several of these challenging trends — from new regulatory mandates to augmented capital requirements to aggressive fintech competitors — are strengthening.

The industry is recognising that it’s nearly exhausted its arsenal of conventional cost-reduction tools and that further cutbacks are likely to be counterproductive to long-term profitability and sustainability in many businesses.

The paper "The productivity agenda" presents the results of PwC’s 2018 Productivity in the Financial Services Sector Survey. It’s part of a series of thought leadership pieces about important issues and opportunities facing the financial services industry and the ways in which senior executives at the most innovative and successful institutions are responding.

Download the paper

Moving forward with a focus

As the introduction of new regulatory mandates diminishes and management concentrates on bringing financial institutions’ performance in line with investor expectations, organisations increasingly have sufficient capacity and motivation to tackle the productivity challenge — and many of our clients understand that they should. Institutions tend to need help, though, in acquiring the skills and tools needed to boost productivity.

We at PwC have identified six areas where clients are focusing their productivity efforts.

Moving forward

The transformation will require technology and humans to work together in a fundamentally new relationship, creating new opportunities for institutions and their employees.

To do this, the employees themselves must be ‘digital,’ and organisations must better leverage the crowd. Concentrating on these six areas is a great place to start the journey.