EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Erste Group was founded in 1819 as the first Austrian savings bank and went public in 1997. From this point on, they pursued a strategy to expand their retail business into Central and especially Eastern Europe. Currently, Erste Group employs over 47,000 people and serves more than 16.5 million customers in 2,444 branches in 7 different countries. In January 2015, Erste introduced its digital banking platform "George" in Austria. George is the leading pan-European banking platform and is currently operating in six countries.  

Goal

For Erste Group to keep up with their strong market position they need to have their finger on the pulse of time and tailor their product range and services to their customers’ needs. By engaging in this university project, the ultimate goal was to create four scenarios on how the future of asset management could unfold in the years leading up to 2030. The exact problem statement was defined as: How will individuals manage their wealth and their savings by 2030?  

Methodology

After making ourselves familiar with the financial services industry we structured the project into three sub-sections: The first one being an exhaustive trend collection followed by the scenario development phase and concluded by giving a solid recommendation for action brought upon by a deep evaluation of opportunities and threats. 

As part of the exhaustive trend analysis, we have gathered more than 60 trends which are connected to the financial services industry. The well-tried PESTEL framework made a systematic clustering possible. After revising the trends we consolidated them to the 25 most important ones rated by their impact and predictability, created a causal loop diagram, which visualized the interdependencies of the respective trends and finally identified a distrusting society and a decentralized organization form as the key drivers in the asset management environment which in turn constituted the basis for our scenario development. 

After having identified our basis for the scenario development phase, a scenario matrix was created to depict four scenarios that are classified by a trusting society/centralized business (ESG Revolution), trusting society/decentralized business (Agility Race), distrusting society/centralized business (Blind Spot) and a distrusting society/centralized business (Generation Heterogeneity) form.

Results

After having established these, our job was to analyze Erste Groups positioning in each of the four scenarios and to evaluate the environment by using a SWOT analysis as an approach.  Scenario implications from the analysis were then discussed with the project partner Erste Group. Based on the results of this SWOT analysis we were able to provide Erste Group with solid strategic recommendations to keep up their strong market position.

Cooperation Partner

• Erste Group Bank AG
  Am Belvedere 1
  A-1100 Wien

Contact Person

• Mag. Armin Blassnig, MBA
  armin.Blassnig@erstegroup.com
  www.erstegroup.com

Student team

• Jonas ASPETZBERGER

• Michael HOFREITHER

• Tobias MITTENDORFER

• Mihail STANEV

• David WEISSENBRUNNER

Project-Manager

• Caroline Fabian, M.Sc.

• Alexander Staub, M.Sc.