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Mensuel : Edition de décembre 2010
Rubrique : Consultance
Titre : Interview with Nathalie Mège, Senior Executive, Management consulting lead – Luxembourg, ACCENTURE
Understand how the crisis has become an opportunity to win market share
Article : Could you summarize the activities of your group?

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 204,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. Accenture does not do auditing work. As Andersen Consulting in 1989 and later as Accenture in 2000, we have focused solely on our Management Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing services, thereby avoiding any issues related for instance with conflict of interests that might occur when having the same firm doing audit and consulting.

What is the record of your activity for 2010?

Throughout the year we saw the mood change. Uncertainty started to make way for measured and cautious optimism. Our clients continue their transformation, they develop and operate new business models. The leitmotiv remains being efficient and agile in a multi-polar world – the way we define at Accenture continued globalization originating from multiple poles around the world. Through our research and our experience working with clients, we see that high performers approach globalization as well as adoption of new information technology with confidence and speed.

This gives them the flexibility to achieve business results and stay ahead of the competition as new economic circumstances arise. These changes have been particularly visible in the financial services sector, where new regulations, public opinion and mergers for example are driving financial institutions to do things differently, forced by staggering performance as shown for instance by the banks’ results in Luxembourg in the first quarters of the year. We also see this need for transformation in virtually all other sectors in Luxembourg – in government, healthcare, industry, telecommunications and services.

We work with our clients in Luxembourg to respond with innovative strategies for talent management, lean six-sigma approaches to cost reduction, post-merger integration, risk management, sustainability initiatives, supply chain optimization, increased client-driven programs and multi-channel distribution – to name a few.

These projects benefit from new technologies and modernized IT systems. The development and operations to deliver and support these initiatives benefit increasingly from global operating models and outsourcing.

How did your group make it through the crisis?

Globally our strategy to serve multiple industries that have different economic cycles continues to serve us well. As could be expected, financial services was most impacted, this slowed our growth in Luxembourg. We are now seeing building momentum in key areas of our business in Luxembourg where we see increased activity across all sectors and for all types of work: management consulting, technology consulting, systems implementation and outsourcing. This demand creates new business opportunities and room for new people, so we are actively recruiting.

How can your group help the financial players in this hard time period?

Through our global scale we know what is happening in other countries. We use this knowledge, combined with our research and experience, to advise our clients. Because we also have a the ability to implement our advice and operate (parts of our) client’s business thanks to our strong Technology capabilities and our Global Delivery Network, we can put our advice into practice. In other words, we can deliver and run what we consult. Our recommendations are designed from the start with tangible outcomes, both quantitative and qualitative, and their implementation in mind. For banking for instance: our ‘Banking 2012’ research shows that the good news is that we see much stronger profitability on the horizon for high performers. We analyzed fundamentals of the top 150 banks worldwide, modeling growth and cost-cutting scenarios to get a view of the industry in 2012. Our research shows that the sector-leaders will be able to get return-on-equity back to 15% by 2012 (from about 4-5% today).

The high performers will be the banks that:
- cut another 20% of their costs - rationalizing distribution networks, building up customer “self-service”, selling off non-strategic assets, right-sizing and outsourcing;
- focus on rebuilding customer trust and loyalty – through smarter marketing and knowing what their customers need and want;
- get better at pricing – the next battleground for profitability will be attracting the right customers at the right margins;
- understand how the crisis has become an opportunity to win market share.

How did the needs of banks/companies have grown in terms of integration services and outsourcing?

We have seen big changes in those two areas in the last few months. In systems integration, we see our clients investing again, but more focused on the business case with tangible outcomes and more in phases. We see that technology as a competitive advantage is back on the agenda, that investment decisions are more scrutinized and that the phased delivery of business outcomes must be ensured in rather short to medium term. In outsourcing, we see increased demand for IT outsourcing and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). More and more Luxembourg organizations (clients and prospective clients) contact us to analyze the potential benefits of outsourcing some of their activities and business processes to companies such as Accenture. A few years ago we were the ones to put outsourcing on the table, now it’s more the other way round.

What are your main targets for 2011?

We want to grow our business in Luxembourg across the most important sectors in Luxembourg such as financial services, healthcare, public service, industry and services, with our end-to-end offering that covers all activities from strategy to operations, e.g.:
- Management Consulting e.g. Strategy, Risk, Finance & Performance Management, Talent & Organization Performance, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Process & Innovation Performance.
- Technology Services e.g. IT Strategy & Transformation, Process & Information Management, Application Development & Management, Infrastructure, Security, Analytics, Cloud, Embedded software, Mobility.
- Outsourcing e.g. Application Outsourcing, Infrastructure Outsourcing, Business Process Outsour-cing (we are PSF certified in Luxembourg since 2008).

We can serve our clients with our people in Luxembourg and with the people from our Belgian and global network:
- We are currently with more than 120 people in Luxembourg with experience in Management Consulting, Technology Consulting, Systems Implementation, IT Outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing.
- Worldwide we are with more than 200.000 people.

O.M.
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