Summary of Avida International Masterclass: How crisis-proof are your relationships? What role should innovation be playing?

The Masterclass started off with Paul Boerboom, who explained the rationale behind the Masterclass: "In the aftermath of the crisis of 2008 Pension Funds started reassessing their relationships with their service providers. We, as Avida International, saw a lot of tender activities taking place. We started to ask ourselves: what are the dynamics of these client-supplier relationships?"  Subsequently, Avida developed its highly successful AICRM® Client Retention Toolkit.

 

After more than a decade of doing these assessments, Avida came to the conclusion that one of the key reasons that client relationships fail, is that suppliers are lacking innovation, thought leadership and the agility to understand how client demands are changing in time.

 

We therefore asked Mr. Martin Reeves, a recognised 'outside the box' thinker and inspirational speaker to discuss what the historical relationship is between crisis and innovation, as well as opportunities for innovation in a highly regulated sector. Mr. Reeves is Senior Partner and Managing Director in the New York office of BCG and Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG's think tank on business strategy. 

 

Mr. Reeves started off by asserting that there will be no 'return to normal'. "Any time when there is unemployment, hardship, disease, discord, or any sort of social dimension to the crisis, the world has always changed in some way." But it is possible to harness this change and use it to your benefit -- by using your imagination. "Imagination is counterfactual thinking. It is thinking about things that don't exist, but could exist. It is an exercise in human creativity." A long list of companies that were either founded during major social crises, reimagined or came up with a major development which changed the company or changed the market begs us to ask the question: "What are the tectonic changes that could come out Covid19 and are we on top of them or are we thinking very incrementally about preserving yesterday's business model?"

 

"And I'm guessing that some of you are thinking: 'But pensions are different'. Every industry thinks that they are different."

 

 

 

 

our independent specialists in investment governance and client servicing have long-standing leadership and operational experience in the asset management, pensions and insurance industries.  They have significant experience of working with clients and a deep understanding of how to deal with changing client demands

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