Context
The Corporate Banking division of RBS had spent 12 months separating out its Decision Support group from business partnering, and off-shoring routine functions to India. They then wanted to deliver a step change and accelerate the business value provided from their finance partnering organisation.
How we helped our client
- We worked directly with the business leadership teams in 3 business units to agree the future role of business finance and the priority decisions to focus on
- We worked with the finance teams to benchmark: The role of finance; The skills and capability gaps; Efficiency and effectiveness of core finance processes like forecasting, reporting, performance management and decision support
- We ran sessions for the finance teams to set out the case for changing how they partnered the business – and created a powerful momentum for change
- We helped to re-prioritise where to allocate scarce business partnering resource according to business value
- We re-defined roles, capabilities and skills for the future
- We identified improvement opportunities for business finance and a roadmap to implement.
The Arcus approach is disarmingly simple but incredibly powerful. We thought we were working closely with the business, but Arcus brought the conversation to another level with our business colleagues.
We originally embarked on a leadership development programme for finance. I’m very glad we switched to the Arcus approach, which proved to be very good value for money when you look at the impact they’ve had with us.
Andrew Barnard
Finance Director, RBS
I’ve worked with many consultants over the years, and this is without doubt one of the best consulting projects I’ve ever been part of.
The ability of the Arcus team to connect with our people is impressive, ranging from our senior business executives and our finance leadership team, to large-scale ‘town hall’ events with all of our finance teams.
They clearly know what they’re talking about and bring a lot of credibility from a wide range of industries.
Nigel Bretton
CFO, Commercial & Private Banking, RBS
