How We Work With Clients

How We Work

We work with clients on a wide range of strategy, operational efficiency and effectiveness, transformation, organizational design, and analytics projects. Typical engagements last between one and four months. We work collaboratively with client resources, and where appropriate also field full-pyramid consulting teams with junior resources. We invest significant time and effort before beginning work with a client in getting to know the institution, the leadership team, and their specific aspirations, challenges, and needs. We prepare detailed proposals, statements of work, and workplans to ensure that our and our clients’ expectations are fully aligned. We usually work on a fixed fee basis for agreed deliverables; where the work is expected to have a direct and measurable impact on earnings performance and valuation, we are also open to performance-based and equity-based compensation arrangements which fully align our and our client’s interests and outcomes.

SouthStar's areas of expertise include strategy and growth; operational effectiveness and efficiency; organizational design; pricing; and finance and risk management.

We like and enjoy working with our clients. At the same time, our role is to challenge conventional wisdom and the status quo, and to drive change, and we do so honestly and independently.

Our Clients

Our clients include banks, financial services companies, financial technology providers, and investors in these sectors in the United States:

Banks: Universal, regional, and community banks

Financial Services Companies: Non-bank commercial and consumer finance companies, financial operations of equipment manufacturers, and financial services operations of large retailers and consumer-oriented corporations

Financial Technology Companies: Consumer and commercial customer-facing fintechs and fintech providers of infrastructure, analytics, and data services to the banking sector

Financial Services Investors: Venture capital and private equity investors in financial services sectors seeking assistance with strategy, opportunity identification, diligence, and portfolio company value creation

Recent engagements include working with a large asset and wealth manager to develop a new service offering targeting small business M&A services; assisting a community bank in developing a strategy for reducing its cost of funding, including repricing and new value proposition development; and working with a regional bank to develop new credit and deposit products to meet client needs driven by climate change and long-term economic transition.