StraitsBridge Advisors
Offering Specialized EPM Execution Capabilities to Financial Institutions

Emerging from the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, financial institutions are facing increasing scrutiny from regulators, investors and boards while navigating through a constantly changing business environment. Organizations are grappling to optimize the balance between growth, returns and risk in businesses. “The urgency to measure and manage these elements is perhaps most felt in the financial services industry,” delineates Sanjay Uppal, CEO, StraitsBridge Advisors. In this scenario, financial institutions are seeking to improve cost management, deepen customer relationships and enhance decision-making. This is driving the need to transform and improve enterprise-wide performance measurement capabilities, and StraitsBridge Advisors offers its expertise to assist organizations in this endeavor.

StraitsBridge, with its head office in Singapore, provides advisory and execution services to help financial institutions achieve growth, manage risks, and optimize shareholder value. “The key enablers to achieving enterprise performance management (EPM) lie in optimizing organizational processes, leveraging right technologies, gaining BI from organizational data, and building the right skills in people. This is where we excel,” adds Uppal.

Financial institutions encounter various challenges in meeting their EPM objectives such as legacy systems, ongoing operational dependencies, budget overruns, and project delays. “We assist our clients achieve their objectives through our bespoke delivery models and methodologies that deliver superior EPM solutions,” says Uppal. StraitsBridge bespoke approach leverages leading practices and adapts them to the context of the financial institution to deliver optimal performance solutions.

The firms’ nine core practice groups deliver comprehensive support offering across the CFO’s domain. The company’s Finance Transformation practice redefines the finance operating model, delivers new processes, services, and analysis that can fundamentally change the way finance function interacts with the businesses. The Performance Management practice assist financial institutions establish robust performance management framework, including development of balanced scorecards, operational dashboards, and streamlining analytics and reporting. The Finance Control and Risk Management practice helps enhance enterprise financial governance including general ledger management and financial reporting.

We assist our clients achieve their objectives through our bespoke delivery models and methodologies that deliver superior EPM solutions

StraitsBridge supports CFOs in their strategic EPM initiatives through delivering actionable insight and high quality results. As CFO for global and regional banks across Asia, Uppal observed that most EPM advisors offer limited execution support. Further, the advice often lacked pragmatism due to the absence of in-the-trenches experience in typical advisory teams. StraitsBridge bridges these gaps through its team of highly-skilled finance professionals who bring together vast global experience to assist financial institutions achieve their EPM objectives. StraitsBridge complements its advisory capabilities with execution capabilities that leverage the firm’s proprietary models and methodologies to deliver successful outcomes.

In one instance, a commercial bank in Asia faced significant challenges in driving effective performance management due to suboptimal systems and processes. The banks legacy performance management systems posed challenges to effectively managing the fast-growing institution. StraitsBridge worked with the bank’s CFO and CIO to develop performance management vision for the bank. The roadmap to achieve this vision was developed through adapting leading practices to the bank’s context which included leveraging bank’s existing investments in IT infrastructure and tools, and making necessary changes to the organization and processes. “Our solution resulted in significant uplift to bank’s EPM,” explains Uppal.

Looking ahead, StraitsBridge aims to become a leading advisory firm, providing specialist and bespoke services across the CFO domain in financial services. “Our firm’s mission is to be a leading independent advisor to CFOs and deliver innovative and outstanding solutions that will build sustainable value for our clients and our firm,” concludes Uppal.