Client Background
The client is one of the largest banks in the UAE, with an extensive Business Banking and SME franchise served through a network of branch-based and virtual relationship managers. Over time, the coverage model had evolved organically, leaving relationship managers stretched across large, uneven portfolios weighted heavily toward low-value and inactive accounts. A significant share of relationship-manager time was being absorbed by servicing, documentation and compliance activity rather than proactive, high-value client engagement, constraining both productivity and revenue potential. Cross-sell depth and trade penetration trailed industry norms, while servicing and compliance workloads were unevenly distributed across centers. The bank engaged Cedar to diagnose the drivers of relationship-manager inefficiency and to define a best-in-class operating model and way-forward roadmap.
Cedar’s Approach
Diagnostic and Stakeholder Engagement – Cedar structured the engagement around a diagnostic of the current operating model, portfolio and strategic priorities, engaging approximately 30 stakeholders across Business Banking functions spanning relationship managers, area and unit managers, client-relationship leadership, acquisition, assets, service and support, trade and central analytics. This was complemented by external conversations with peer institutions to benchmark practices against the wider UAE market.
Issue Diagnosis Across Four Themes – Cedar consolidated the findings into eight key issues impacting relationship-manager productivity, organized across four high-impact themes:
- Coverage Model – relationship-manager loading, customer-service-representative support and portfolio segmentation.
- Commercial Effectiveness – sourcing quality of high-value relationships and cross-sell effectiveness.
- Operations and Compliance – routine service requests and the compliance-alert burden on relationship managers.
- Product Penetration – engagement depth and specialist dependency in trade finance.
Target Operating Model Design – Cedar re-imagined a segment-aligned coverage model that matches client value to the right servicing channel, differentiating branch relationship managers, dedicated virtual relationship managers and a newly introduced shared virtual relationship-manager layer, each with defined roles, product responsibilities and coverage norms benchmarked to industry practice.
Way-Forward Recommendations – Cedar translated the diagnosis into sixteen improvement initiatives mapped to the eight issues and structured across four levers — operating model, organization, digital and process — including portfolio rebalancing, centralized and digital servicing, value-led acquisition and incentive redesign, analytics-led cross-sell, streamlined compliance management and a trade-champion capability model.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
Cedar delivered a re-imagined, segment-aligned target operating model and a prioritized roadmap of sixteen initiatives that together reposition relationship-manager capacity toward higher-value client engagement while shifting routine servicing to centralized and digital channels. The recommendations align the bank's coverage norms, servicing support ratios and portfolio-governance cycles to leading industry practice, with the potential to meaningfully release relationship-manager capacity and improve engagement depth, cross-sell and trade penetration.
The way forward positions the bank to execute the initiatives as a phased program across the operating-model, organization, digital and process levers, embedding structured portfolio reviews and analytics-driven engagement to sustain productivity gains without proportional headcount growth.