Innovation Consulting Services

Driving competitiveness with cutting-edge innovation strategies, methdologies and tools.

In a financial landscape that's constantly evolving, succeeding means embracing innovation. Ulysses Partners specializes in Innovation Consulting for Financial Services, tailored to meet the unique challenges of today's financial institutions.

With a team of seasoned experts and a proven track record of success, we don’t just consult — we partner with clients to “bring ideas to the discipline of the market”.

Services At A Glance:

Innovation Assessments

Innovation Assessments provide a detailed analysis of your current innovation practices. Gain actionable insights and strategic recommendations to align with data from global industry leaders.

Innovation Playbooks

Create a sustainable innovation culture with our customized Innovation Playbooks. These guides offer practical strategies and tools to consistently generate and execute innovative ideas.

Innovation Sprints

Our Innovation Sprints focus on swiftly turning ideas into competitive innovations. Through expert-led prototyping and testing, we significantly reduce time-to-market.

Scenario Analysis

Scenario Analysis equips you to face emerging market risks and trends with confidence. Our strategic tool and methodology explores multiple futures, providing clarity and options in volatile financial environments.

What Makes Us Different?

Extensive Experience in Financial Services Innovation

Every strategy is drawn from our team’s deep pools of experience and domain knowledge, ensuring that our clients’ innovation journey is charted by industry experts.

Seamless Integration of Risk Management and Compliance Best Practices

Our approach embeds risk management and compliance considerations from the outset, ensuring that effective control and adherence to regulatory requirements does not impede speed to market.

World-Class Frameworks and Methodologies

Through our partnership with Innovation360, we bring a spectrum of globally tested, robust innovation methodologies to every project. These practices are refined and personalized, ensuring that our clients benefit from strategies that are both universally proven and individually tailored.

Services in Detail:

Our suite of specialized services is designed to elevate your financial institution's innovation capabilities. Each offering aims to transform challenges into groundbreaking opportunities for growth and leadership in the market.

Women in Financial services holding a digital networked ord.

Innovation Assessments

The Problem: Financial institutions face difficulties achieving their aspiration to be innovative. Often this arises from a mismatch between their capabilities and their aspiration resulting in missed growth opportunities and inefficiency in adapting to market trends and customer expectations.

The Solution: Provide a comprehensive evaluation of an organization's innovation capabilities, benchmarking against industry standards, peers, and leaders. Identify strengths, and areas for improvement, and provide actionable insights to enhance innovation strategies and processes.

Description:

  • Thorough evaluation of a client's innovation capabilities using various tools and methodologies.

  • Analysis of innovation culture, strategy, processes, and resource allocation.

  • Delivery of a detailed report with findings, benchmarks, and actionable recommendations.

  • Ideal for organizations seeking to understand and improve their innovation performance

Key Benefits:

  • Clear understanding of innovation strengths and weaknesses

  • Alignment with industry best practices and FS peers/leaders globally

  • Informed decision making to enhance innovation capabilities

  • Strategic roadmap for long-term innovation success

Women in financial services interacting with a screen

Innovation Sprints

The problem: Financial services professionals struggle to rapidly innovate due to the absence of a clear process, time constraints, lack of agile expertise, and balancing innovation with operations. This hampers speed to market and competitiveness.

The Solution: Rapidly prototype and test new ideas to accelerate innovation, reduce time-to-market, and enable more agile and responsive approach.

Description:

  • 2-6 week collaborative process to brainstorm, prototype, and test new concepts

  • Includes workshops, ideation sessions, and rapid prototyping

  • Guided by experienced facilitators

  • Results in validated ideas ready for further development

Key Benefits:

  • Accelerates innovation and reduces time-to-market

  • Encourages creative problem-solving

  • Provides quick feedback and iterations

  • Identifies viable solutions early

Person in financial services typing on a computer

Innovation Playbooks

The Problem: Financial services professionals often lack effective innovation processes, methodologies and governance that deliver consistent results. This results in inconsistent innovation efforts and poor resource utilization. There is also lack of clarity around ways of working and handoffs in the innovation lifecycle There's a challenge in maintaining an innovation culture.

The Solution: Innovation Playbooks tailored to your bank's specific needs and goals. Includes strategies, methodologies, and tools for a sustainable innovation culture. The Playbook covers idea generation, evaluation, project management, commercialization and success metrics. It is ideal for organizations seeking structured innovation management.

Description:

  • Innovation Playbooks tailored to your bank's specific needs and goals.

  • Includes strategies, methodologies, and tools for a sustainable innovation culture.

  • Covers idea generation, evaluation, project management, commercialization and success metrics.

  • Ideal for organizations seeking structured innovation management.

Key Benefits:

  • Structured approach to integrate innovation into the organization.

  • Enables consistent generation and execution of innovative ideas.

  • Improves adaptability to market shifts and customer needs.

  • Promotes a lasting innovation culture within the organization.

Three people at a screen, focused, in financial services

Scenario Analysis

The problem: Financial services firms face increasing uncertainty and volatility from many different directions, inclduing digital disruption, new competitors, cyber threats, economic changes, and geopolitics. Planning in an uncertain and volatile environment is challenging and traditional strategic planning lacks resilience.

The Solution: Scenario analysis is a proven strategic tool that has helped major organizations navigate uncertainty for decades. Scenario analysis buils strategic resilience by examing multiple futures to provide clarity and options, enabling financial services leaders to make better decisions. This service is essential for banks and others facing growing disruption in 2024.

Description:

  • Understand origins and evolution of scenario analysis into a key strategic tool

  • Investigate possible futures and distills them into insightful storylines

  • Provide banking leaders proven approaches to understand emerging risks and trends

  • Enables better management during high uncertainty periods

Key Benefits:

  • Clear understanding of innovation strengths and weaknesses

  • Alignment with industry best practices and FS peers/leaders globally

  • Informed decision making to enhance innovation capabilities

  • Strategic roadmap for long-term innovation success

Let’s work together:

Would you like more information on each service or to book a one-on-one call to assess your needs? Complete this form, listing a few details on your company and your starting point for reaching out.