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COO Transformation: Mastering Complexity in Wealth Management

Authors

5 minute read 15 Jul 2025

This study empowers COOs to become transformation architects, mastering complexity with behavioral insight and strategic foresight.

In brief

  • We decoded how COOs in Swiss and Liechtenstein wealth management navigate complexity across strategic, structural and operational dimensions.
  • Complexity has an elliptical footprint. Strategic noise, structural friction and change overload create each bank’s unique complexity ellipse.
  • Mastery demands more than traditional oversight. COOs must sense hidden signals and apply behavioural insight to lead operations with clarity and control.

Today’s wealth management COOs are at a turning point. Once focused purely on operational oversight, they now navigate a growing terrain of complexity where strategic agility, regulatory intensity and structural friction collide. As transformation demands rise, so too does the burden of orchestrating execution across systems, silos and CxO boundaries. This study investigates how COOs are adapting to this new complexity frontier. They are shifting from implicit control to behavioral sensing and evolving into transformation architects. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 COOs across Switzerland and Liechtenstein, we decoded the complexity landscape across three key dimensions: strategic, structural, and operational. Our findings are grounded in real-world transformation programs and segmented across three clusters of wealth managers, defined by structural attributes including CIR, booking center footprint and regional reach.

Voice of the COOs

Complexity is not the number of programs. It’s the friction between them.

COO

Wealth Manager from Zürich

How EY can help

  • Transformation

    Discover how to confidently navigate complex transformations and emerge stronger, more agile and positioned for future growth with Enterprise Reimagined – our Transformation framework

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Strategic, structural, and operational complexity collectively define the COO’s complexity dimensions. Strategic complexity arises from blurred CxO boundaries as business models evolve. While the COO’s raison d’être to safeguard the operating model remains intact, the role now spans technology, governance, and cross-functional alignment. As C-suite mandates intersect, the risk of accountability gaps grows, particularly where transformation programs stretch beyond traditional boundaries. Structural complexity is driven by five systemic forces primarily around regulatory burden, technological legacy, organizational design, client demands and financial constraints. These drivers are common across banks, but their intensity varies by cluster. Their interactions amplify friction and shape how COOs must prioritize, govern and execute. Operational complexity emerges within the strategy cycle. Sourcing, shoring, and streamlining remain central levers, but are often deployed reactively. COOs manage complexity indirectly through budget, time, and scope trade-offs, without a shared framework to anticipate compounding pressures or interdependencies. Across all clusters, simplification strategies are used differently, reflecting scale, regulatory context and talent constraints.

We manage complexity implicitly—mainly through deadlines, budget pressure, and headcount limits.

COO

Wealth Manager from Geneva

We need a lens to connect what people feel with what the metrics show.

COO

Wealth Manager from Zürich

Strategic Reflections

Strategy cycles convert strategic intent into change portfolios. COOs contain complexity through time, cost and scope decisions, without a formal language to define or direct it. Our analysis reveals that complexity does not arise from any single transformation program but from how portfolios interact, overlap, and evolve over time. Each change program leaves a ripple that builds, peaks, and subsides. Together, these form a complexity footprint that distorts the intended execution trajectory. The portfolio consists of regulatory, strategic and lifecycle programs which, in the absence of complexity, would follow linear paths. In practice, however, these initiatives compete for attention and funding. Without a coherent lens, complexity compounds silently. Scope creeps, timelines shift and accountability fragments. Oversight becomes strained as COOs manage more than they can see. The complexity ellipse offers a new lens for understanding transformation. It maps how explicit and tacit complexity distort the strategy cycle. Above the axis lie visible signals such as cost overruns, delays and shifting scopes. Below the surface, tacit complexity builds through governance bottlenecks, cultural resistance, overload and fatigue. These cannot be detected through metrics alone. They must be sensed through soft signals such as surveys, meeting patterns and adoption gaps. We argue for a mindset shift. Complexity must be articulated before it can be shaped. The complexity ellipse provides both language and structure, allowing COOs to see the true footprint of transformation and recalibrate with intent.

Evolutionary Pathway to Complexity Mastery

As Einstein warned, we can't solve today’s complexity with yesterday’s logic. Behavioral sensing enables a paradigm shift—unlocking evolutionary pathways that reduce the complexity tax rather than merely absorbing it.

Dr. Ingo Rauser

Partner, Business Transformation

Complexity has a footprint. Strategic noise, structural friction and change overload shape each bank’s unique complexity profile. Most COOs continue to manage this through familiar levers, but the limits of reactive control are now clear. Control must evolve into sensing. Simplification alone does not resolve complexity. It only suppresses it. Transformation portfolios, if unmanaged, distort execution and create blind spots. Mastery begins when COOs pair delivery oversight with behavioral insight, reading signals that traditional KPIs miss. The COO of tomorrow is a transformation architect, able to anticipate disruption, orchestrate portfolios and stabilize performance at scale. Complexity will not disappear. But with a new language, a behavioral toolkit, and the ability to sense what lies beneath the surface, COOs can begin to lead transformation rather than be led by it.

COO Market Study - Mastering Complexity in Wealth Management across Switzerland and Liechtenstein

This study empowers COOs to become transformation architects, mastering complexity with behavioral insight and strategic foresight.

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Summary

Today’s COOs operate within a complexity footprint shaped by strategic noise, structural friction and change overload. While most still rely on sourcing, shoring and streamlining, transformation portfolios introduce distortions that create blind spots. Mastery begins when COOs shift from tactical control to sensing, detecting early signals that traditional metrics miss. By fusing operational oversight with behavioral insight, tomorrow’s COO evolves into a transformation architect. Our study offers the language, lens and path to complexity mastery, empowering COOs to anticipate pressure, sustain execution and align the operating model with tomorrow’s transformation demands.

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    Banking and capital markets
    Wealth and asset management

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