Alan Colberg
Global Head, Financial Services practice
Bain & Company
Excellence in Financial ServicesSince Alan Colberg took the helm of Bain & Company’s Global Financial Services practice in 2003, it has grown by about 20 percent annually. In terms of headcount and revenue, it is now one of the three largest practices inside Bain and accounts for about 20 percent of Bain’s total revenue.
Impressive. But Colberg thinks the practice is primed for tremendous growth in the years ahead.
“The financial services environment is going through an enormous amount of flux. We’re seeing changes in the regulatory framework in markets around the world. We believe that consolidation is inevitable,” Colberg says. “We want to be the partner to regulators and to business. We think that we can fundamentally transform the industry into something quite better.”
To help focus on these opportunities, Colberg will soon be spending 100 percent of his time on financial services. For more than a decade he’s also served as the managing principal of the Atlanta office, after helping found the firm’s presence there in the early 1990s.
Now that the office has reached critical mass, he expects it to be more successful than ever. “The Atlanta office has been arguably one of Bain’s most successful start-up offices of any in the world. The market’s growth rate and the influx of new businesses have helped to fuel that growth,” Colberg says. “Atlanta has been constantly innovating, in terms of diversity recruiting, staffing models, etc. It motivates me and energizes the partners here.”
His drive for constant improvement is seen in everything he touches. “I’ve always had the philosophy that I have to make things better than when I started. In my time outside of Bain, I chair one of the leading international schools in Atlanta,” he says. “I gravitate toward roles that enable me to make things better.”
Colberg credits his father for this passion. “He was a college professor. And he sent me down this path,” he says. “He brought us to Atlanta 35 years ago to teach at Emory University. He spent his career helping librarians effectively deal with the overwhelmingly amount of information.”
As financial services firms today find themselves similarly overwhelmed by changing market conditions, Colberg says his father’s lessons become more relevant than ever.
—Jess Scheer
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