Q: How can we improve operations to optimize profit margins?

A: Deloitte research recently revealed that 44 percent of Canadian companies 10 years or older had stagnant or negative three-year revenue growth rates between 2009 and 2016, and were unable to earn enough to cover interest payments on their debt. They are facing a defining moment. An under-performing business requires a situational and financial analysis, using advanced data analytics and modelling, to identify problems and inform mitigation strategies.

Q: How can we optimize to drive growth?

A: The business landscape is complex and unpredictable. While companies can make many changes to cut costs or make incremental improvements to meet ongoing challenges and opportunities, transformation focused on growth can directly enable a business’s strategy and goals.

An organization may choose to take on a growth transformation project for a variety of reasons. Often, its talent, business processes, and infrastructure cannot handle the rising transaction volumes, or competition or unprofitable growth is causing cost pressure. Such drivers can often make or break a company—they trigger a defining moment.

Instead of limiting the possibilities by continuing with its current processes, talent, and technology, a company’s executives can optimize operational capabilities by thinking broadly and creatively about what the company truly needs to grow, transform, and deliver new value.

Q: How can we ensure we’re complying with all the regulations we need to while using operational changes to our advantage?

A: Strong compliance and reporting processes can in fact help organizations differentiate themselves from their competition. The energy a company puts into better understanding its business, customers, risks, and capital can be used to drive changes in how and where the organization operates in the future, up to and including its business mix. The investments many leading companies have made in recent years to meet stringent regulatory requirements have brought business benefits above and beyond their original purpose, such as new ways of doing business, a focus on capital efficiency as well as capital sufficiency, and new, mutually beneficial partnerships with regulators.

Q: How can we protect our brand and reputation by determining our levels of exposure to fraud, corruption, and other financial crimes before they happen?

A: Businesses rely heavily on their reputation. But a growing number of risks can tarnish their good standing: becoming victims of fraud or assets theft, for example, or being embroiled in complex litigation or business disputes, or being accused of financial mismanagement or wrongdoing.

To effectively detect, assess, prevent, and respond to a reputation-damaging crisis or financial crime, organizations should consider a strategic and holistic approach to risk management. Compliance-based processes that address particular risks in a siloed or piecemeal fashion are giving way to methodologies that consider many types of financial crime risk across the organization. Regulators expect to see this risk-based approach—and still expect an overall compliance strategy.

Q: When the market is volatile, how can we plan and deploy our capital?

A: From assessing traditional assets and intellectual property to examining technology and supply chain ecosystems, objective valuation services are required to inform critical, value-based capital decisions.

A well-structured approach will ensure decisions are effectively framed and processes are established so that the right capital scenarios can be planned and executed. A thoughtful approach gives you more control to align your resources with strategic priorities, greater insight into a project’s risk and return, more accountability and buy-in across the organization, clearer rationale for investment choices, and, ultimately, a sustained strategic advantage.