Business leaders must rethink how to deftly manage expectations from increasingly impatient stakeholders, and apply genuine innovation to strategy, service delivery and operational processes. These solutions must be highly focused and integrated, to address pressing, short-term priorities, while also flexible and scalable, to respond to tomorrow’s yet unknown threats and opportunities. Management must also undertake these strategies in a transparent manner, to repair trust in financial institutions following past blows to public confidence, including the recent Panama Papers revelations.

The articles in this edition of Frontiers in Finance speak to these challenges. They range from the looming impact of next generational investors on wealth management, and the mounting compliance demands upon internal audit, to accelerating industry-wide efforts to transform banking payments and capital markets transactions with disruptive blockchain technology.

In light of the scope and diversity of these issues, many of the success factors for financial services organizations are changing right before our eyes. As JeremyAnderson’s Chairman’s message points out, financial institutions must be prepared to reinvent themselves, including the way they are led and how decisions are made.

As such, we consider how deep change must be injected into current management approaches, whether by evolving the post of Chief Financial Officer, empowering the Chief Data Officer, or encouraging data analytics experimentation to regain customer relevance, drive efficiency and identify fresh growth.

Our feature articles also explore how a number of financial services organizations are now bringing this prescription to life and moving from concept to action in the marketplace.

We see that the emerging banking force Atlas Mara is successfully penetrating untapped opportunities in Africa, and how incumbent global insurers are redefining the rules of partnership and collaboration to test the non-conventional Blue Marble micro-insurance consortium.

We hope this issue of Frontiers in Finance brings greater clarity to some of today’s critical issues and highlights practical steps that can lay the groundwork for business transformation that responds effectively to the dramatic, continuous change facing the industry.

For more information:

Contact Pierre Fourie
Head of Financial Services
KPMG in South Africa
pierrejnr.fourie@kpmg.co.za

• Can a strong customer covenant lead to lighter touch regulation?
• Data management strategies turn compliance reporting into business insight for banks 
• Recovery and resolution: Preserving our engines of growth
• CEOs of financial institutions expect more from their finance function
• Financial services investing in blockchain but barriers remain for rollout as a banking technology solution
• Creating a sustainable digital wealth management platform
• Grow or go: Insurance groups take a portfolio approach to growth
• Africa Rising 
• Taking on the impossible: Competing insurers collaborate to create new markets and solve global challenges