Insights for Oct 23
1. In conversation with Ravi Anand (ThinCats): Growth, SME lending, and market opportunities
Financial Services Insight Interviews — a new series featuring some of the top leaders across insurance, banking and lending — kicks off with a discussion about alternative financing for SME businesses and ThinCats’ recent move into the financial advisor space. Ravi Anand of ThinCats joins L.E.K.’s Peter Ward and Bronswe Cheung to unpack the opportunities and challenges of this specialised end of the lending market.
2. The end of free money – Why financial engineering is no longer enough to realise full value from integrations
With an uncertain economic environment and significantly higher funding costs, it is more important than ever that acquirers following buy and build strategies think about maximising the return from the integration process and set up their enlarged organisations for growth. Having multiple units that are ‘somewhat’ or ‘loosely’ integrated or ‘aggregated’ will not deliver the full potential of an enlarged organisation or create an institutional grade business that is favoured by investors.
Our perspective is that acquirers need to go through three key phases – ‘Acquire’, ‘Integrate’, and ‘Elevate’ – to deliver the overall strategy and operational efficiencies across the enlarged organisation when pursuing buy and build strategies.
3. State of the U.S. Banking sector – Regulatory dynamics
Historically, the U.S. government has shown strong appetite to respond to banking crises, support recovery and minimise economic disruption. The government response to the bank failures of 2023 was no exception.
In our previous edition of our 3-part series we discussed some of the events that led up to and ultimately caused the 2023 banking crisis (see below for link to part 1). Here we discuss the resulting regulatory dynamics shaping the banking sector and its constituents.
Part 1: Lead up to the crisis
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