Ed Lawler, the CEO and Chairman of Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest mutual funds organisation states:

”With practice KAIZEN or continual improvement can become a way of life…It’s an attitude, a spirit that prevails at all time in the company.

It’s not something that you can expect to implement overnight or turn on when sales are dropping.

But once KAIZEN takes hold, employees and managers alike begin to recognise that part of their job – as important as doing work – is learning how to improve the way they do it.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies that want to be leaders in their fields have to ask continuously – How can we do the job better tomorrow than we’re doing today?”  Source: Gemba KAIZEN - Imai

Given the significant challenges that the industry has faced over the past twelve months, we believe that KAIZEN, with its particular focus on people engagement and development, building cross-functional understanding, the customer and improving organisational quality has a significant role to help the industry recover and prosper in the future.

KAIZEN thinking and its unique array of tools and techniques can assist organisations in the Financial Services industry in the following way:

• Restore trust with customers, stakeholders and the general community
• Find new opportunities for growth in a more risk averse and regulated environment
• Improve collaboration and knowledge sharing across the business
• Reduce the estimated average 40% plus of organisational activity that is deemed non value added/waste
• Apply KAIZEN more broadly to all areas of the business and functions e.g. IT, Finance, new product/service development etc
• Continue to simplify business processes and make it easier for customers to do business with the organisation
• Develop a more transparent, open and ethical/values driven organisation etc.