As a young consultant in 1989, Davide Taliente was intrigued by "the curious and dynamic environment" of investment banking. At the London-based Oliver Wyman, Taliente has found a perfect fit for his passion for financial services and consulting. As managing director and head of Oliver Wyman's EMEA region, Taliente has helped build the boutique firm into an international financial services consulting powerhouse that helps clients address the industry's top concerns – consolidation, regulation and capturing market share. For starters, he substantially raised the boutique firm's global profile by developing relationships at the client CEO level.
Taliente was instrumental in establishing the firm's Senior Advisory Board, a thought leadership think-tank created to address the most complex and challenging issues facing the broader financial services industry. The board members include some of the more experienced practitioners in the industry, namely former and current senior managers and/or board members at top-tier organizations.
"The real challenge was getting the first two [members] on board with recognized names," Taliente says of the six-month process. "Once that was done, the rest followed pretty easily. You had to sell to them the vision of the company, where it was going, what it was trying to do. They've seen a lot of consulting companies come and go. They needed to believe that we were here to build something quite different."
In the last five years, Oliver Wyman grew its CEO relationships in Europe from just a few to nearly 30.
Taliente was a founder of the Capital Markets practice in the late 1990s and pivotal in spurring its rapid growth, securing relationships with all of the bulge-bracket investment banks and several regional players. He was the global head of the practice between 2000 and 2004.
In his current role, Taliente has been responsible for the development of new and innovative strategic and organizational approaches designed to help senior executives meet and exceed their strategic and operational objectives.
"Investment banks are probably the most sophisticated clients in the world. They set a very high watermark in terms of what they're looking for in advisers," Taliente explains. "You always have to be on your toes and at the forefront of industry development. That sets you up well for advising the industry more broadly."
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