Scenario Planning and Generative AI in Financial Services
A Blueprint for Future-Ready Financial Services.
We are in an era of a rapidly increasing rate of change. These frequent shifts, from geopolitics to technological changes, can materially affect how businesses operate - providing businesses that adapt faster with a more substantial advantage in the market. Those who fail to adapt and respond could face losses in market share and, in extreme cases, an existential threat.
Businesses can improve their strategic resilience by thinking about, planning for, and preparing for multiple futures through the use of Scenario Planning. This is particularly relevant today as the pace of change and uncertainty is expected to significantly escalate with the roll-out and adoption of generative AI.
The financial sector is no stranger to change and, over the last decade, has had to adapt and respond to various crises that have tested its financial and operational resilience. In addition, it has had to contend with the growing intensity of regulations and regulatory supervision, disruptive technologies, and changes to the financial market structure that has included Fintechs, embedded finance, and Open Banking. As uncertainty and volatility increase, traditional linear approaches to strategic planning are less effective. Planning and preparing for multiple futures instead improves strategic resilience and, therefore, the ability of businesses to not only mitigate the risks but also take advantage of the opportunities the changes present.
The High-Level Process of Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning can be an exercise of imagined futures, developed with rigor that tests the business's responses in extreme but plausible circumstances, or a bland routine discussion of a business's subsequent actions to meet its goals. A general process can help a diverse team balance these two situations. At a high level, these are the main steps a team should follow when using Scenario Planning to inform their strategy discussions:
Defining scope and objectives: Establishing clear objectives and goals helps keep the team focused on shared outcomes.
Identifying and categorizing external forces and trends: In this step, trends and forces are examined for their impact on business. These could be regulatory, skills-based, or even technological.
Brainstorming possible future scenarios: Scenarios are developed by considering the forces and trends that are most influential, plausible, and probable. Scenarios emerge through the dynamic interplay of relationships between the underlying forces selected.
Analyzing scenarios for strategic implications: Narratives are then developed for each of the selected scenarios, and the implications for the business are considered under each of them. Strategies need to be developed in response to each to either mitigate the risks or capitalize on the opportunities that present.
Applying Scenario Planning to GenAI in Financial Services
To illustrate the immediate impact Scenario Planning can have on your strategic planning process, we've asked the Ulysses Partners Team to do a quick Scenario Planning exercise on the impact of GenAI on Financial Services. GenAI is currently an area of intense focus for the financial sector, but it is a technology in its infancy and, therefore, subject to much uncertainty. It, therefore, is an ideal subject for scenario planning. There are many GenAI forces to be explored and should be unpacked and prioritized based on their impact, scalability, and implementation feasibility. In the example below, we have developed scenarios based on two key forces: i) Adoption of GenAI and ii) Personalization of offers. Using the high-level process above, here are two of the key scenarios and their effects on business strategy that our team developed:
1 - High Adoption of GenAI:
What will this scenario look like?
GenAI is adopted throughout the value chain of all financial services businesses.
Processes with a high level of human input would be significantly affected.
Each task's complexity level will be monitored so that we understand what can be automated by GenAI and what would require continued human supervision.
Appropriate and mature guardrails would be in place to ensure quality, consistency, and appropriateness of output.
Product innovation would soar as GenAI rapidly analyzes market trends, consumer behavior, and economic indicators.
What are some of the strategic implications of this scenario?
Investment in GenAI would need to be prioritized to maintain growth and competitiveness.
The talent you nurture must be skilled in adapting to change and open to taking on new roles and responsibilities, including knowledge and supervision of GenAI.
Your business must have robust risk and compliance management frameworks that can easily change or adapt to new GenAI business strategies and regulations.
Your team's ability to test and deploy new products must be honed for efficiency and accuracy so that you can take advantage of AI's potential market opportunities whilst mitigating risks associated with bias and ethics.
2 - Hyper-personalisation:
What will this scenario look like?
Your business can recommend products and services to customers with high accuracy before they need them.
The level of customer engagement in your business soars as GenAI creates insights specific to their individual needs.
Products can be immediately adapted to the customer's needs with unprecedented detail and speed to market.
Product pricing can adjust in real time to an individual's lifestyle changes, current portfolio, risk profile, usage, etc.
What are some of the strategic implications of this scenario?
Access to reliable, high-quality data (both real-time and not) and trained models are critical to delivering hyper-personalized offers. l. Leveraging 3rd party data sources is a strategic advantage but needs to be managed for privacy and intellectual property risks
Offers need to be subjected to testing and review to detect bias and discrimination.
Embedding a culture of the ethical use of AI will be paramount for the configuration of GenAI in a way that does not prioritize profits over what's best for the customer.
First-mover advantages need to be considered. Once a customer is entrenched in a highly personalized product ecosystem, acquiring them becomes costly.
Putting it all together
These are just two of the many scenarios the Ulysses Partner Team reviewed. However, with this example, you can see how the interplay between the GenAI trends and forces can result in various scenarios, each with multiple strategic implications in their storyline. Through our partnership with Innovation360, we have developed a SAAS platform to help you identify and prioritize the key drivers and trends, develop scenarios, analyze them for strategic impact, and ensure that they remain dynamic and responsive to the changing environment.
How can you ensure that you identify and develop quality scenarios? Our team at Ulysses Partners has facilitated many of these discussions. This success comes not only from our proprietary platform but also from the years of experience the team holds in financial services. This experience contextualizes your discussions, ensures that you prioritize the scenarios correctly, and helps you understand how this ties directly to your strategic roadmap.
As financial services navigate increasing uncertainty, its ability to identify and assess the impact of different scenarios emerges as a strategic tool. Completing the exercise with you and your team makes your business flexible and more likely to withstand the uncertainties of technological innovation (like GenAI), regulatory changes, market dynamics, and other disruptive forces. It positions you to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.