success story

A Defense against the Entry of Chinese Super- competitors

Our client, a leading Southeast Asian bank, was facing the entry of Chinese super-competitors in its geography and needed a strategy to face the inevitable-super-competitor entry into the payments and banking space to dig into and take our client's share of the market. We assembled a team of Banking and Financial Services, Digital Strategy, and China Insights experts to prepare a wargame to guide our client to a strategy to grow while facing this new type of competition. Through this wargame, our client learned how to think like these new super-competitors and now has a playbook that utilizes digital reinvention as the key to mobilizing against this threat.

 

 

The Challenge

Our client, one of the largest banks in Southeast Asia, watched with concern as Alibaba and Tencent established partnerships, invested in local companies, and built government relationships in its geography. Our client worried that, as had happened in China, these super-competitors, whose roots were outside banking, were positioning themselves to rollout their broader ecosystems, including payments and banking services, to domestic consumers.

The Solution

We customized a traditional strategy tool, the Wargame, to help our client develop a strategic response to the threat of digital disruption. To prepare, our strategic researchers canvassed the globe, analyzing a range of market insights and digital trends to formulate competitive playbooks against these super-competitors. This provided a backdrop for interactive sessions with the client during which we tested and refined market moves and countermoves against traditional and disruptive competitor actions. 

Throughout this wargame process, Virtusa's team of digital strategists and banking subject matter experts guided the client to define a competitive strategy to defend its market position and shore up weaknesses while also gaining new customers and revenues through an enhanced set of digital capabilities and partnerships.

The Solution
The Benefit

The competitive strategy our client built out through these wargaming exercises provides it with a series of markers to track. These markers consist of competitor and regulatory actions that, when observed, signal that a new phase of the competition is beginning or that a competitor is about to deviate from the anticipated path. With alignment around a vision and roadmap in-hand that will ensure its long-term viability through digital reinvention, our client is now mobilized against threat of these new competitors and therefore positioned to more rapidly adjust to changes in this evolving, competitive environment.

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