Who we are
Strategic Solutions is a professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, digital, technology, customer experience, and operational efficiencies through automation.
Strategic Solutions works where business and technology meet to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their company and customers. Our expertise is helping companies seamlessly link sustainable digital transformation, operations, performance improvement, and value creation.
With over 15 years of executive experience in financial institutions, Strategic Solutions provides these services with an understanding and capability of regulatory compliance. While the principles of transformation, automation, customer experience, continual process improvement, and value creation are portable across many industries, compliance in today’s regulatory landscape requires a customized, institution-specific, approach.
Competitive approaches include:
- Fintech engagement through business unit embedded IT, Centers of Excellence, and inexpensive Proof of Concept through Cloud instances.
- Aligning customer delivery with end-to-end processes by classifying and mapping customer journeys, implementing continual process improvement initiatives (including design thinking), and creating and managing cross-functional teams.
- Transformation implementation through managing complex systems and their amplifications and rapid prototyping with risk mitigations (fail fast framework).
- Spontaneous innovations with collaborative employee engagement.
How we do it
We are collaborative and entrepreneurial. We immerse ourselves in your company to learn your core competencies and culture in order to gain better insight into your operational and strategic potential. Strategic Solutions works with you to co-create ideas, action plans, and roadmaps customized specifically for you.
Strategic. We work closely with your executive team to customize a clear and tangible vision of transformation success, establish buy-in, and define a believable path to fulfillment. Employing Rob Ryan’s sunflower model, we guide you through identifying your core competencies and system mapping current and future opportunities for cost reductions and/or new products and/or business. We help companies develop digital and IT strategies that address emerging business needs for improved customer experiences, transparent and adaptive processes, and dynamic products and services.
Transformation. Transformation begins at the executive level and can include digital, cultural, operational, and strategic innovations. We help companies develop a practical approach to rapidly innovate, disrupt, and accelerate their business at scale. Our focus is more than a one-time transformation. In fact, seventy percent of such transformations fail. Successful transformations are implemented as a sustained continual process improvement initiative. We show you how to effectively innovate and automate in order to successfully adjust to a constantly evolving market.
We do this in four steps:
Set direction. A successful transformation in the wrong direction will probably be worse than no transformation. We ask the hard questions to help you determine the best direction for your company and how to get there. We then help you communicate the transformation’s vision, spreading the change from the top down, and laying out the mandate and need for change.
Shift ownership. Once the mandate for change is communicated from the top, ownership of the change switches to those at the source. This often requires a change in culture where employees feel engaged in the decision and solution process—often resulting in what we refer to as spontaneous innovation.
Obtain commitment. This is where cultural change often occurs. Aligning cultures and behaviors helps creates an emotional commitment to transformation.
Implement Transformation. Sustaining the change, by embedding it into your culture, dialogue, coaching, incentives, and day-to-day tasks that allow your organization to sustain its transformation and continually respond to a dynamically changing environment.
Digital. Digital competitiveness requires agility and fast adoption. This is not an easy combination for most financial institutions, reliant on waterfall development and constrained by regulatory processes, to incorporate.
Our digital delivery model is built around the need to think big, experiment, and scale fast. We help our clients visualize and develop capabilities in real time through design thinking.
Empathize: Learn about your customers by observation and interview.
Define: Create a point of view that is based on a user’s needs and insights.
Ideate: Brainstorm as many creative solutions as possible. Wild ideas are encouraged.
Prototype: Build a representation of one or more of the generated ideas to show others. This prototype is still a rough draft.
Test: Share your prototyped idea with users involved in step one to discover what worked and what didn’t.
While integration isn’t normally included as part of the recognized 5-step process of design thinking, it is critical to understand that integrating a transformation, product, service, or platform is not final. Continuous improvement requires continual iteration even after implementation.
Strategic Solutions’ Current Projects
Partnering with Amazon Cloud Services to transition Asset Liability Management, Interest Rate Risk, and Federal Reserve Stress Test system (known as QRM) to the cloud for banks ranging in size from $40 billion to over $100 billion in assets.
Advising commercial banks on securing online technology company loans.
Working with a stealth startup providing cheap deposits for banks and innovative retail marketing for merchants
Advising commercial banks on securing online technology company loans.
Guidance on Lean Portfolio Management (SAFe® ) implementations
Guidance on AI/ML for financial services and products.
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