After an official kick-off meeting attended by the board director sponsoring the project, the various teams met for the first time. Everybody needed to be brought on board about the overall goals, the teams' roles, and the responsibilities of each individual. None of the client team members were assigned full-time to this project, which meant that they would need personal encouragement as well as active help by the McKinsey consultant in working on their deliverables.

As a first step, a client team member reviewed the bank's existing product offering. McKinsey team members surveyed the competitive landscape with the help of our colleagues in the McKinsey Research and Information department. Some of these colleagues were continually involved in our work by digging up important information to support the fact-based analyses we delivered to our client.

Help from Around the World
McKinsey team members also collected international best practice examples with help from McKinsey experts around the world. In phone conversations, through e-mails, and sometimes by spending a couple of days with the team, these experts shared state-of-the-art knowledge in e-banking, and helped us to understand the strategies of the most successful international players (while also safeguarding client confidentiality). They provided valuable input in timely and detailed responses to our questions.

Our analysis helped us formulate ideas about ways to improve our client's e-banking offering. We evaluated these ideas in sub-project meetings with the active participation of our client team members.

We then summarized the best ideas from each sub-project into an overall proposition, which we present to the board director.

Phase 2.