| dc.description.abstract | The future of banking in Kenya is very bright and promising. The growth stage that the sector
has been in for the past decade is the developmental stage that is inevitably, and unfortunately
so, characterized by banking structure equalization pressures, such as bank collapses,
temporary customer confidence dents and cross-border frauds. When looking at the future of
the Kenyan banking sector now, the question is how we can move on to the pre-maturity stage
of the growth cycle. Given the current state of the sector and related economic linkages (which
are generally still looking quite positive), movement forward would require, inter alias,
conscious and committed strategic actions from the players in order to survive.
The research project was a case study on Barclays Bank Kenya Limited. The two objectives of
the study were to identify strategy implementation processes within BBK and establishing and
documenting the challenges for implementing strategies within BBK.
In order to meet these objectives, primary and secondary data was collected. Primary data was
obtained through personal interviews of respondents who were responsible for implementing
strategies in BBK. Secondary data was obtained from various sources.
The study established that a change committee had been set up, alongside the strategic
committee to teach the elephant how to dance because BBK ran the risk of slowly turning from
an eagle into an elephant. Nine challenges for implementing strategies were identified and
these were the need to modernize the business, BBK's efficiency, improving the quality of
BBK's products and services, building a high performance organization, outperforming
competition, the economic and political situation, the influence of foreign exchange rates,
customers' expectations and demands from regulators.
The processes of implementing strategies in BBK were found during the study to be quite effective measured by the financial performance as reported in the annual financial reports. To increase the efficiency of employees, the end-to-end management team was found during the study to improve processes so that employees spent more time on service to customers and less time correcting mistakes. The team was formed to understand what goes on in the business. The team worked with staff in service delivery and other functions to design ways to map processes step by step, identifying where and why they break down and finding ways to fix them. All the processes were designed to help the business get closer to its customers. Barclays Bank Kenya Limited had found that the one-size-fit-all philosophy of the past could no longer work in sustaining a business. | en |
