McKinsey Cross-Sell Workstream: Mapping Retirement-to-Wealth Expansion Scenarios

Sparsh was assigned sole ownership of a workstream within a McKinsey commercial due diligence engagement. The PE client wanted to understand whether their target, a retirement services company, had a credible path to cross-selling wealth management services to its existing customer base.

He began by building a structured scenario map: drawing on McKinsey's internal knowledge base and secondary research, he developed a set of distinct hypotheses for how the cross-sell could work, ranging from direct wealth product bundling to referral-based models.

To test each scenario, Sparsh conducted targeted expert and stakeholder interviews. Because direct competitor interviews were restricted under McKinsey's protocols, he focused on former employees of competitor firms and strategy-level contacts who had visibility into how leading players were approaching the same opportunity.

The interviews produced a clear tiering. Some scenarios were already being executed by leading players and had strong evidence behind them. Others were in early pilot phases with limited data. A subset did not hold up under scrutiny.

When the client pushed back and asked for more data-backed support on the neutral scenarios, Sparsh was direct about the limitations. He built a market sizing model to give the client a quantified estimate, but was explicit that the numbers rested on assumptions, not observed data, because competitor databases were not accessible.