About SouthStar Advisors
SouthStar Advisors' advice to clients is grounded in the conviction that achieving superior performance in the financial services sector requires both operational excellence and distinctive value propositions and strategies.
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After decades of consolidation, the US banking industry is still highly fragmented, with 4,500 FDIC insured banks, a roughly equal population of credit unions, and a large population of non-bank commercial and consumer finance companies. Historically, many banks followed broadly similar strategies, providing similar products and services to similar customer segments at similar price points, Excess returns were generated through executional excellence - doing the same things as competitors but better.
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We believe that the next generation of banks and bankers will face fundamentally different requirements and opportunities for superior performance and value creation. Structural factors - overcapacity, regulation, growing technical infrastructure costs - may pressure average returns down, but we believe that the degrees of freedom for strategic innovation in the banking industry will grow exponentially. Increased digitization, opportunities for infrastructure virtualization, the creation of ecosystem-based partnership business models, the growth of embedded finance, BaaS, and other alternative strategies, are radically the breadth of possibilities available to banks and other financial services companies.
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Executives like to talk about strategic "North Star" visions for their companies. But everyone can't - or shouldn't - follow the same star. Hence our name. We work with financial services clients to improve operational effectiveness and to conceive and implement highly differentiated business strategies.
Our core belief is that superior performance in the "new" financial services world will require not only executional excellence - the ability to get things done fast, better, and more efficiently than competitors - but also strategic distinctiveness: the willingness and ability to do do different and unique things.
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The implications for banks and other financial services companies are profound, including the need to develop more flexible and agile cultures; to radically improve the speed of decision-making; to develop systematized approahces to fostering innovation; and to increase the willingess and improve the abvility to manage business risk
