Cedar Podcasts

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International

Sustained profitability is difficult in the low-margin, highly competitive US restaurant industry, yet opportunities exist for suppliers with strong market insight. Tabletop products cutlery, dinnerware, drinkware and related items are essential to dining experiences but are often commoditized, with suppliers competing mainly on price, shape, and color. Operators focus on cost control, simplicity, and operational ease, while distributors resist unproven, low-volume innovations, making market entry difficult.

At the same time, guest expectations are shifting toward experiential, customizable, and “share-worthy” dining. This creates openings for suppliers that offer genuinely value-added, trend-aligned products. A case in point is the revival of roasted bone marrow, which meets guest desires for novelty and theatrics while offering operators low costs and high margins. This trend revives demand for niche items like marrow spoons products many suppliers already stock but fail to promote.

The key lessons are to deeply understand market details, rely on solid research rather than hype, rediscover overlooked solutions, and take a long-term, strategic approach. Innovative niche products can serve as powerful “foot-in-the-door” opportunities in rigid markets.

Open Banking is a collaborative model that enables the secure sharing of customer-approved banking data through open APIs, fostering both collaboration and competition. This dual dynamic drives innovation, improves customer choice, and enhances financial experiences. FinTech's leverage open APIs to build user-friendly apps, deliver real-time insights, and create tailored solutions, while banks benefit from partnerships and access to broader ecosystems.

Key enablers of Open Banking include customer consent, standardized and interoperable APIs, data security, and strong privacy regulations. Major applications include account aggregation, payment initiation, personal finance management, faster credit assessments, lending, and investment services.

The benefits are significant: improved customer experience, wider access to services, increased innovation, better pricing through competition, and greater financial inclusion using alternative data.

However, challenges remain around data security, interoperability, customer trust, unequal access for smaller players, and regulatory complexity. Addressing these issues through strong governance and industry-wide standards is critical. Overall, Open Banking is reshaping financial services and laying the foundation for future banking.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming banking by reshaping processes across data management, lending, security, compliance, and customer engagement. AI, analytics and automation enable banks to process large data volumes, predict market trends, and improve decision-making. Key application areas include automated data collection and analysis, AI-driven credit and lending decisions, process automation through RPA, enhanced cybersecurity and fraud detection, and faster, more accurate KYC and customer service.

Across banking segments, AI supports fraud detection and engagement in retail banking, improves loan approvals and risk management in corporate banking, and enables personalized advice and micro-segmentation in wealth management through robo-advisors. Prominent use cases include chatbots, portfolio management, compliance monitoring, fraud prevention, and robo-advisory services.

The advantages of AI include reduced operational costs, improved customer support, faster credit decisions, and stronger security and regulatory compliance. Overall, AI is a critical enabler of efficiency, profitability, and innovation, positioning banks for the future.

Customer-driven competition is reshaping how suppliers compete, as customers now define performance criteria, evaluate suppliers systematically, and reduce reliance on traditional relationships. Driven by downsizing, technology, and consolidation, this model aims to cut costs and force suppliers to meet customer expectations in markets with fewer buyers and sellers.

Global consolidation pushes customers to work with fewer suppliers that can deliver consistent quality, cost and service worldwide—raising the stakes for scale, coverage and account management. While winners gain deeper relationships and efficiency, losers struggle to re-enter and supply risks increase.

Price-minus contracts replace cost-plus models, compelling suppliers to continuously improve productivity or innovate to protect margins. Multidirectional integration sees customers moving backward into private labels or forward into services, sometimes turning customers into competitors.

E-commerce adds new screening mechanisms, forcing suppliers to integrate into customer platforms while also lowering entry barriers. Overall, suppliers must improve products, reduce costs and adapt faster to sustain competitive advantage in this evolving landscape.

Building a successful digital bank goes far beyond launching mobile apps or marketing campaigns; it requires a customer-centric value proposition, strong internal capabilities and an organization-wide cultural shift. The digital journey begins by clearly defining “what’s in it for the customer,” ensuring technology, operating models and capabilities converge to deliver superior experiences. As banking has moved from branch- and product-centric models to digital, leading banks now blend high engagement with technology, offering personalized, “virtual relationship manager” experiences.

Behind customer-facing channels, robust core systems, middleware and data platforms are critical. Predictive analytics and big data enable deeper understanding of customer behavior, powering personalized offerings and smarter decisions.

True transformation depends on nurturing a digitally aware organization, where employees actively promote and support digital adoption. Finally, banks must institutionalize a digital operating model across sales, fulfilment and service, while managing cyber and fraud risks. Digital banking is not a destination but a continuous journey of adaptation and innovation.

Although digital transformation tops most banks’ agendas, only about half achieve success because digital banking is often treated as a technology project rather than a business transformation. Technology is an enabler; true success depends on customer engagement, experience and continuous innovation. Banks must dispel key myths: digital initiatives cannot be deferred, as rapid technological and customer behaviour changes demand speed to market. Digital banking cannot be driven by IT alone; it requires strong leadership, cross-functional ownership, cultural change and enterprise-wide commitment. It is also not limited to mobile or online channels, but represents a convergence of channel, segment, product, process and technology, powered by data, cloud and AI. Rather than competing head-on, banks should collaborate with FinTechs to combine innovation with scale, capital and regulatory strength. Finally, analytics must go beyond reporting and KYC to deliver predictive, personalised insights. Ultimately, successful digital banking hinges on leadership vision, mindset and holistic transformation, not technology alone.

Human capital is critical to business success, yet many Middle East organizations historically underinvested in HR due to reliance on transient expatriate labor and a focus on basic personnel administration. This has led to weak people development, low motivation and high attrition. As governments push nationalization and businesses recognize HR’s impact on performance, attention to structured HR practices is increasing. Key regional challenges include unclear organisation and grading structures, poorly defined job roles and performance measures, absence of HR policies, inequitable compensation systems and weak HR processes. Addressing these requires clear organization design, transparent job descriptions with performance-linked rewards, simple and well-communicated HR policies, and systematic HR processes covering manpower planning, recruitment, induction, performance management, training, succession planning, employee engagement and exit management. Shifting the mindset from viewing HR as a cost to seeing it as a strategic investment can improve productivity, retention and long-term business results.

Omnichannel banking aims to deliver a seamless, consistent customer experience across all channels, moving beyond transaction-focused multichannel models to experience-led engagement. With over 70% of customers using multiple channels, banks must prioritize transparency, relevance and personalization to drive loyalty and retention. Central to this is designing digital customer journeys around “moments of truth,” tailored to customer personas and channel context—especially mobile, which is now a major revenue driver.

Successful omnichannel strategies require integrated front- and back-end systems, enabled by open APIs, to allow customers to move effortlessly across devices and channels. Banks face challenges from siloed systems, complex integrations and fragmented customer data. An agile, customer first approach assessing, analyzing, designing, implementing and measuring journeys helps address these gaps.

Payments exemplify omnichannel potential by integrating smart data, loyalty and commerce into a unified experience. Ultimately, effective omnichannel models lower acquisition and operating costs, improve product penetration and increase revenue per customer, delivering measurable bottom-line impact.

The real estate (RE) sector remains vital to economic and social development but is undergoing major transformation driven by technology, sustainability, shifting lifestyles, and post-pandemic work patterns. While office occupancy has declined in developed markets, demand for logistics, data centres and larger, wellness-oriented homes is rising. Despite a standardized six-stage RE lifecycle, the sector faces challenges including a fragmented ecosystem, rising material and labour costs, land scarcity, asset obsolescence, and under-digitization. Growth in regions like the Middle East is supported by policy, infrastructure and immigration, yet efficiency and differentiation remain critical. The way forward lies in strong top-down leadership, centralized and sustainable procurement, and a shift from design-to-build toward design-for-experience. Innovation through RE-as-a-Service, automation, data, AI and IoT can unlock efficiency, new revenues and superior customer experiences. Firms that embrace lifecycle-wide innovation and partnerships can create lasting value.

Core Banking Systems are critical to a bank’s competitiveness, and selecting the wrong platform can lead to major opportunity losses. Despite many vendors offering proven solutions, success depends on choosing a system that truly fits the bank’s business strategy and future needs. Based on extensive regional experience, Cedar outlines a structured, objective approach to selection. Key steps include clearly defining and prioritizing business owned requirements, choosing the right sourcing model (prime vendor vs. best-of-breed), and fixing evaluation criteria upfront. A transparent RFP process, disciplined solution evaluation led by business users, and rigorous reference checks are essential. Detailed contractual and financial terms, including total cost of ownership, must be carefully assessed to avoid surprises. When these steps are executed well, half the project is already complete, significantly improving the chances of timely, successful implementation and long-term value realization.