Client Situation

Our client is one of the largest commercial banks in Qatar with assets over $13Bn. Founded in 1979 the bank serves over 150,000 customers and has a branch network across 37 domestic and 10 international locations. The bank provides best in its class domestic and international banking services for its retail, corporate and institutional clients across four business groups. In view of growth potential in Qatar, and internationally the bank engaged Cedar to review its current strategy and employ the balanced scorecard to develop a new strategy.

Cedar’s Approach

In this program, Cedar was mandated to provide a detailed growth and transformation strategy, along with the deployment of budgets to elevate the bank into one of the foremost Bahraini Islamic Banks.

  • Cedar reviewed key internal data, while also conducting an external analysis as part of the analytics phase of the process.
  • Conducted 20 executive level, one-on-one interviews to understand key strategic issues and undertook an internal analysis across 5 focus areas.
  • External analysis included an assessment of Qatar’s economy supplemented by an evaluation of the banking sector of the GCC region and of Qatar and 11 interviews conducted across 7 banks.
  • Determined the areas of opportunity, especially in SME, retail and wealth management space while also listing down some external challenges.
  • Determined and finalised objectives and owners along with recommended measures for each objective.

Outcome

The program resulted in the building of the bank’s corporate Balanced Scorecard

  • Identified clearly defined customer and financial objectives as the key to solving customer and financial issues
  • Recommended the use of a value chain model to solve process based strategic issues.
  • Identified clear definition of organisational and IT based objectives as key to solving their respective issues.
  • Successfully conducted the client’s strategic workshop.
  • Resulted in successfully formulating the enterprise’s strategy map and Balanced Scorecard.
  • Ensured alignment of the bank’s initiatives to its strategic objectives.

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