Marcus Ehrhardt and Lars Hille join partnership of BCG & Roland Berger

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Roland Berger have added partners to their German operations. Lars Hille, a former board member of DZ Bank, will join Roland Berger’s Financial Services practice as a Senior Partner, while Marcus Ehrhardt has joined BCG as a Partner in the firm’s Healthcare and Operations practices.

“We are very pleased to welcome Lars,” said Markus Strietzel, who leads Roland Berger’s Financial Services division in Central and Eastern Europe. Hille brings over 25 years of experience in banking to the German-origin strategy consultancy, most of which has been gained at DZ Bank. After working for Mummert und Partner (acquired by Sopra Steria) and the German Stock Exchange, he joined DZ Bank in 1998. DZ Bank is the central institution for more than 1,000 co-operative banks in Germany and their 12,000 branch offices, making it the country’s second largest bank by asset size. The circa 30,000 employees of the banking institution generate revenues of over €6.5 billion.

From 2007 onwards, Hille serves as DZ Bank’s Chief Financial Officer, responsible for the group’s finance operation as well as for several large programmes, including the firm’s digital agenda. After he steps down from his role, Hille will in November this year join Roland Berger as a Senior Partner.

“Financial service providers and especially banks are undergoing a fundamental process of transformation of their business models, so exciting and challenging tasks are ahead of us,” he said, adding; “Roland Berger gives me the opportunity to bring my know-how and experience in finance and business model engineering directly to the table of clients.”

The appointment comes at a time when Germany’s banking landscape is unsettled. Deutsche Bank, which last year hired McKinsey & Company to help it with updating its strategy, is rumoured to be in discussions with rival Commerzbank as the pair explore merger synergies; bank officials have however slammed the news as ‘fake news’, and criticised the media for bringing rumours to life. Meanwhile, German banks akin to their European counterparts have faced a dip in economic profits off late, an analysis by The Boston Consulting Group found, against a backdrop of rapidly changing markets which are requiring them to ramp up their investments in digital to remain relevant.

In another top appointment in consulting, Roland Berger’s rival The Boston Consulting Group has added German-national Marcus Ehrhardt to its Partner team. BCG has 90+ offices globally, and in Germany, the firm’s seven growing offices in the country generate revenues estimated to be around €830 million.

Ehrhardt is an experienced consultant to executives in the healthcare industry. He joined from Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business formed in 2014 after the Big Four firm acquired Booz & Company. Ehrhardt was based in the firm’s New York office, out of which he led Strategy&’s US Operations practice for the Life Sciences industry. He specialises in strategic transformation, performance improvement, supply chain management, digitisation, sourcing and pharma-distribution. He also has a track record helping private equity firms with due diligence, turnaround and post-merger integration work.

During his 18-year tenure at Strategy&, Ehrhardt was recognised as a ‘Global Young Leader’ by the Atlantik-Bruecke Association, a transatlantic network of leading American and German decision-makers. Prior to joining the strategy consultancy in 2000 (Booz Allen Hamilton at the time), Ehrhardt worked at General Motors both in Europe and the US, and for the Department of Economics at Frankfurt University on an international research project on technology and innovation management.

Earlier this year, Strategy& in Germany bolstered its banking practice in Germany with the addition of former Bain & Company advisor Robert Bischof.