SPECIAL EDITION • THE NEXT NORMAL
Realigning Priorities for the New (ab)Normal
Tactics to Win in a K-Shaped Recovery By JP Nicols, Alloy Labs Alliance
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inancial institutions are in another strategic planning and budgeting season, and this one has more uncertainty than ever before. Even the dire financial crisis era had some generally predictable, if sobering, trendlines that financial executives could get their heads around as they planned ahead for the next year or so. College of William & Mary adjunct professor Peter Atwater coined the term “K-shaped recovery”; positing that profound and persistent economic inequality is likely to produce not a single broad course of recovery for the economy as a whole, but multiple vectors. Positive outcomes for some, negative for others; and even within that, steeper for some and shallower for others.
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• July-August 2021
Add to those variables the lack of consensus as to when a recovery of any shape might actually even begin, and it hardly portends a certain future to which boards and management teams will be eager to commit precious limited resources. Ready or not, the calendar pages will continue to fly by regardless, and financial institutions can’t afford to just sit back and just see what happens. While the natural inclination might be to slow down and delay action given so much uncertainty, that will only create a bigger gap to close. A better approach is to embrace the uncertainty and actually move faster, but with these three tenets in mind. First, don’t ignore the underlying long-term trends. Like everything else in our lives, all aspects of banking have
