Banking & Financial Services · Pakistan
How a Strategy Conference in Sri Lanka Helped Askari Bank Absorb an Entire Consumer Banking Business
7th Largest Bank in Pakistan
13 Month Engagement
One Unified Consumer Bank
7th Largest in Pakistan
Bank Ranking at the Time
July 2006 to August 2007
Engagement Period
Bentota,
Sri Lanka
Strategy Conference Location
4
Core Deliverables
The Story
An acquisition that needed more than paperwork to work
Askari Bank, then the 7th largest bank in Pakistan, was acquiring the consumer banking business of Union Bank, a bank that was closing its doors. On paper, that’s a transaction. In practice, it meant combining two distinct consumer banking teams, two sets of processes, and two ways of doing things into one functioning bank, without leadership actually agreeing on what that combined bank should look like.
People Perfect was brought in to build that agreement from the ground up, not through a memo circulated after the fact, but through a high-level strategy conference with Askari’s top management, held offsite in Bentota, Sri Lanka.
That conference set the direction. What came next was turning agreement into an actual operating structure.
The Problem
Three things standing between an acquisition and a working bank
01
Two Consumer Banking Operations, No Shared Structure
02
Buy-In That Had to Be Real, Not Just Signed Off
03
No Post-Merger
Operating Model
What Changed
Before and after the merger
The Approach
A blueprint built with the people who had to live with it
People Perfect ran the strategy conference in Bentota as a working session, not a presentation. Askari’s leadership helped shape the actual blueprint for change alongside People Perfect’s team, rather than reviewing a finished plan after the fact.
Out of that conference came a job evaluation system, new role job descriptions, and a performance management system tied to the bank’s new business plans and linked directly to a performance related pay philosophy. An in-depth implementation plan carried the work forward from there, run by People Perfect’s own functional specialists.
The Results
What thirteen months of alignment actually built
Two separate consumer banking operations combined onto a single blueprint, one org design, and one performance framework.
A comprehensive strategy report, functional action plans, a new distribution model and org design, and job descriptions rebuilt for the post-merger organization.
13
Months Strategy to Full Implementation
From the initial conference in Sri Lanka through to a completed implementation plan, delivered as one connected engagement rather than a series of disconnected handoffs.
