Today, reputation is no longer one challenge among many; it has become ‘the’ challenge, especially in professional services businesses.
Goldman Sachs’ continued success hinges on cultivating a reputation that maximizes client, shareholder, and stakeholder value. Apart from dozens of other insights, this was just one of the takeaways from an extensive multi-year study analyzing the experiences and perceptions of more than 4,000 C-suite executives and senior managers from Fortune Global 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies. The study examined the peak of the pyramid in European wholesale banking — that is, banks providing commercial, corporate, and/or investment banking services in Europe. Goldman Sachs was one of Europe’s top players.
A bank’s corporate reputation should always be anchored in six key success factors:
1. An excellent client strategy fueling both client satisfaction and loyalty, embedded in a ‘client-driving’ rather than a ‘client-driven’ approach — that is, an approach focused on proactively shaping client needs, priorities, and expectations.
2. An external engagement strategy prioritizing ongoing, mutually beneficial, and superior interactions with all essential external stakeholders: from clients to communities.
3. A competitive strategy enhancing the bank’s distinctiveness in its key business dimensions versus direct and indirect competitors, resulting in uniqueness, first and foremost, in the eyes of the bank’s most important clients, shareholders, and other relevant stakeholders.
4. A professional (people) development strategy focused on promoting excellence, fostering a collaborative mindset within the bank, and building a smooth-running ‘leadership-followership’ engine.
5. An innovative culture encouraging the systematic development of new products and services that strengthen and deepen client relationships.
6. An effective and efficient business model focused on enhancing the bank’s [1] client responsiveness, [2] organizational agility and resilience, [3] clarity and transparency of product/service offerings, [4] reliability and predictability as a business partner, and [5] alignment with evolving market dynamics (for example, geopolitical, regulatory, and other impactful forces).
By focusing on these success factors collectively, banks can improve or revitalize key aspects of their performance and prominence. In today’s banking industry, reputation isn’t just one facet of the game — it ‘is’ the game.
For more details about Goldman Sachs’ research results, please visit www.pieterklaasjagersma.com/reports.