I recently attended the EY Global Analyst Summit 2024, the theme of which was Rethink! The conference sought to answer the question, “How is EY rethinking the value it delivers?” and this blog looks at how EY is rethinking its activities in support of the BFS industry sector.

EY has been growing its business rapidly, with the most recent numbers showing 15% revenue growth for the FY year ending June 31, 2023. EY is rethinking and doubling down on its transformation offerings to grow its business further and is investing in two areas (IP and offerings) to enable differentiated delivery of transformation projects.  

Intellectual Property  

EY is focusing its IP investments on accelerators, frameworks, and platforms, and is developing business solutions in partnership with ISVs and FinTechs. EY’s key platform offerings are:

• EY Fabric: a global foundational technology platform providing reusable assets, standards, and access to IP for all EY technology projects. 69k EY clients are using Fabric with 2m unique users globally
• EY Nexus: a technology platform that combines EY’s industry knowledge and implementation experience to help their clients push the boundaries of new ideas, accelerate problem solving and simplify business operations ​
• EY Canvas: a unified audit platform that digitalizes the entire audit process
• EY.ai: a platform supporting enterprises looking to implement AI, providing access to solutions, people, and methodologies. Ey.ai has 100 AI apps deployed, 10k dedicated EY employees, and receives 330k visits per month.

The key benefits banking clients derive from these platforms are the ability to:

• Standardize platform transformation for global enterprises across multiple LOBs and markets. For global banks, this allows units to maintain independence and local market compliance while still enabling centralized risk management and CX to adhere to the bank’s global standards   
• Reduce cost and time to market on implementation. One banking case study provided claimed a 70% reduction in implementation effort for a global bank due to the combined use of AI and RPA embedded in the implementation platform.          

Offerings

EY has eleven categories of service offerings. The conference highlighted two offerings in the BFS industry: managed services and sustainability.

Managed services are its most recently created offering category (see my blog “EY Managed Services Driving Increased Efficiency for Clients” from June, 2022). Managed services have been growing faster than EY’s expectations and currently over 500 managed services clients are buying four or more managed services solutions from EY. Since June 2022, EY has added three new lines of managed services: customer & growth, supply chain, and technology services. 

Managed Services

Managed Services recently acquired a FDL, which provided one of the clients with centralized data management taxonomies, practices, and services across its disparate businesses. EY will build the FDL capability into a high-end managed data services offering for global enterprises, enabling them to:

• Create a unified data model across their businesses
• Build an integrated data-ingestion-to-user experience
• Integrate AI into their data processes
• Build persona-based data products.  

Global banks, which have diverse business segments and customer bases with highly diverse businesses, are expected to become a large client base for the managed data service offering.  

Sustainability

EY’s sustainability practice has delivered 17k engagements for 11k clients with a dedicated Climate Change and Sustainability Services team of 4K professionals. EY has applied and learned from its internal sustainability activities and reduced the EY carbon emissions by 43% from 2019 to 2023 while growing its headcount by 40%. The practice provides ESG and Sustainability technology services across:

• Reporting and performance management
• Green IT and responsible computing
• Sustainable supply chain and operations
• Decarbonization and net zero transformation. 

Sustainability for BFS services focuses on reporting and Green IT, and it will soon add three services to support banks' lending activities and sourcing decisions. Sustainability services for BFS are delivered from the managed services unit. After several years of breakneck growth, BFS represents the largest single industry segment in EY’s sustainable managed services.   

BFS Industry Offerings

EY’s BFS industry cloud offering is Nexus, a platform for financial institutions looking to digitalize their operations. Launched in 2020, Nexus runs on clients’ choice of cloud provider infrastructure and comprises industry-focused products packaged to address market and client challenges. ​One way in which banks are using Nexus is to accelerate their adoption of modern core platforms. To develop emerging functionality for banks, EY is working with alliance and ecosystem partners to develop joint offerings, starting with a lower-cost lead generation solution.   

An example of Nexus’ recently delivered large-scale banking cloud migration engagements is where a consortium of four New York-headquartered global banks set up a cloud-based processing system for syndicated loans and now processes 65% of all syndicated loans. Based on Microsoft, the platform uses blockchain technology to enable transparency down to the loan level. The platform has reduced settlement times from weeks to days.

EY has three focus areas for growth in BFS: technology modernization, risk management, and sustainable development; and it has built the tools for rapid delivery to improve processing in these three areas. EY recently acquired a FDL, enabling it to deliver the data management capabilities to populate these three focus areas with better data and analytics. The FDL capability will allow it to accelerate the growth of its current offerings for BFS. 

EY is working on several initiatives to provide banks with better access to and use of their existing data:

• Data analysis to reduce time to value for mergers. The banking industry expects to accelerate the pace of mergers over the next few years. To support their clients, EY

developed a comprehensive suite of FinTech solutions to help scale acquisition strategies and service models as well as foster organic growth and engagement within financial institutions’ customer base leveraging the partnership with MoneyLion and its embedded marketplace infrastructure technology, data insights and content solutions

• Enabling wealth advisors to use complex internal data to improve customer offers. In one case, a large wealth manager wants to integrate Open AI into its platforms to provide its advisors with enhanced access to internal data 
• FIS, the core banking platform and solutions vendor, wants to migrate its applications to the cloud. Cloud delivery will enable FIS to expand the range of clients and markets it sells to. EY, in partnership with Microsoft, has developed migration accelerators. Six solutions went live on the cloud in December 2023.   

Summary

In summary, EY’s banking practice is doubling down on offerings that migrate platforms to the cloud, making more data accessible to a broader range of users and delivering managed services to clients. These new offerings will allow EY to reach out to markets and clients, such as mid-size firms, where it has not been active. Managed services and industry-specific transformations are the fastest-growing segments of its BFS business and promise to be less cyclical than its traditional professional services business.