Overview
After the financial crisis in 2008 an innovative and entrepreneurial Wall Street firm asked Reos Partners to support them in examining the fundamental implications of the crisis for their core clientele (institutional investors) and to subsequently explore opportunities to deliver a fundamentally different value-proposition to the public.
Reos Partners worked with a small internal team to co-design a 8-month process moving through three distinct phases of work.
The first was focused on understanding the structure of the industry segment and the unmet needs of the core clientele – the institutional investing community. This was achieved by training a small team within the firm in the “deep dialogue process”. This team then met with many stakeholders to explore key aspects of the current system and their perspectives on barriers, opportunities and their desired future reality.
The raw material from these interviews was then synthesized into “themes” and “unmet needs”, which were tested with colleagues in the firm and subsequently refined. The new version of these insights were then shared with key industry players and validated. This was the milestone – or proof of concept after which the scope of the work was defined and agreed internally.
The second phase was focused around building rapid-cycle prototypes and wireframes of ideas that would address the most important unmet needs and explore the most interesting game-changing opportunities. In parallel, there was also a focus on building partnerships with a few “key customers” that would collaborate in refining the approaches and champion the work more broadly. At the end of this second phase several “vignettes” of the ideas were brought together and consolidated to create a “platform”. This “platform” was then presented to the key customers for feedback and evaluation. The buy-in from the “key customers” represented the second major milestone.
The third phase was focused on refining the prototype “platform”, defining a work-plan for development of the version 1.0 platform and articulating the business model and investment case for the CEO and Board.