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Greg Phalin

Senior PartnerCarolinas

Greg Phalin

Senior PartnerCarolinas

Helps banks, insurance companies, and business-process-outsourcing companies set operations strategy, organizational structure, and governance

Greg leads McKinsey’s retail-banking operations and technology work in North America and customer-care and business-process-outsourcing (BPO) work globally. He is also a key leader of the firm’s service-operations work. He brings more than 25 years of expertise in operations and technology—for both front and back office—to his work with clients in a range of industries and sectors. He has deep functional experience with credit cards, payments, retail banking, and property and casualty insurance. Additionally, Greg serves as the senior sponsor of McKinsey’s Digital Labs platform and architecture group, helping to build a proprietary tool that helps clients understand and capture the benefits of disruptive technologies and platforms, such as machine learning, robotization, and artificial intelligence.

In his client work, Greg has helped banks, insurance companies, telecommunications companies, BPO companies, and others with IT strategy, IT architecture, big data management, application development and maintenance, infrastructure, and transformation-program management. He has helped clients build out new captive-service-delivery locations, outsource business processes and technology, and develop location and resource strategies. He also works with clients on reengineering, multichannel interaction and integration, workforce-performance management and improvement, desktops and other service-delivery technology, service to sales, and differentiated customer service.

Greg’s functional expertise with operations includes marketing and acquisition, originations, fulfillment, distribution, branch design, service delivery, and enabling technology.

Examples of his recent client work include the following:

  • redefining a large company’s digital customer-care model, focusing on digital experience and technologies
  • reducing a large-scale telco’s cost of call-center operations by 75 percent
  • improving a top five BPO company’s operating margin by 8 percent
  • leading the acquisition of a top ten BPO company
  • building and implementing a new operating model for a leading multinational BPO company
  • supporting a top five retailer in the transformation of its multichannel-service model
  • helping multinational and regional banks transform their care operations

Prior to joining McKinsey, Greg spent nearly two decades at a global management-consulting and professional-services firm, specializing in financial-services operations and technology issues. He has also served on the executive-leadership team for a call center and back-office-outsourcing company.

Published Work

The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service,” McKinsey & Company, March 2023

Using analytics to increase satisfaction, efficiency, and revenue in customer service,” McKinsey & Company, October 2018

Why your call center is only getting noisier,” McKinsey & Company, July 2017

Winning the expectations game in customer care,” McKinsey & Company, September 2016

Past experience

Accenture
Executive Partner

Education

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
BS, accounting information systems