This is a profile image of Holger Wilms

Holger Wilms

Holger Wilms

Works with private and public financial institutions in the Americas, Europe, and Africa on strategy, operations, organization, and digital transformations

Holger works with private and public financial institutions across the Americas, Europe, and Africa. His private-sector work focuses on advising life as well as property and casualty carriers on issues, such as strategy, operations, distribution, and digital transformations. With an interest in sustainable growth, Holger works with clients to identify next-generation opportunities to expand business, increase profitability, and improve efficiency. He assists executives in developing digital strategies, redesigning customer journeys, and assessing their organizations’ digital maturity while setting a course to increase the rate of innovation and change.

Holger’s public-sector work focuses on international development and public-finance organizations. He has assisted clients with development strategy, financial inclusion, and organizational effectiveness and agility, and he has served multilateral and national development institutions across Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Examples of Holger’s recent client work include the following:

  • developing business-unit strategies for top ten commercial-lines carriers focused on identifying next-generation growth opportunities
  • leading a greenfield build of digital, direct-to-consumer business—including an end-to-end customer-back-experience transformation and a digital test-and-learn engine—for a midsize life-insurance carrier
  • designing an end-to-end digital strategy for a top ten global life insurer, focused on digital-opportunity identification, initiative prioritization, and design of an execution road map
  • creating and implementing an integrated sales transformation for the exclusive channel of large European multiline carrier focused on implementing a technology-enabled need-based advisory approach
  • supporting a financial-service and insurance consumer segmentation that focused on understanding evolving consumer needs, including advice, distribution, and product trends
  • leading a major European bank’s postmerger strategic turnaround, which included capital optimization, HR strategy, portfolio optimization, product review in a low-interest-rate environment, and development of a direct-banking strategy
  • assessing digital-finance applications of and developing implementation case studies for the energy, agricultural, and health sectors in East Africa
  • spearheading a banking-sector reform program in North Africa that included design and implementation of a national transformation program focused on overall business planning, risk assessment, and operational enhancements for small- and medium-sized banks
  • deploying a major public financial institution’s organizational turnaround, with a focus on enabling horizontal knowledge flows, integrating expertise across regional-sector organizations, and establishing centralized knowledge-management procedures
  • conducting macroeconomic and industry-sector work for a western European country, with a focus on financial regulation, labor policies, responses to demographic change, and development of sector-specific growth strategies

Keenly interested in insurance industry dynamics and trends, Holger has written several articles on innovation and digital leadership.

Published work

The age of innovation,” McKinsey & Company, March 2017

Time for insurance companies to face digital reality,” McKinsey & Company, March 2017

The hallmarks of digital leadership in P&C insurance,” McKinsey & Company, August 2016

Education

Harvard University
MPP, economics and public policy

Johns Hopkins University
MA, international economics and international relations

University of Oxford
BA, philosophy, politics, and economics