Giovanni Viani
Partner
 // . //  Our People //  Giovanni Viani

Based in Milan, Giovanni serves the top Italian and European banks on retail and business banking, organization, strategy, credit, restructuring, risk, and governance; he has also been supporting systemic banks in Greece in establishing the first European unlikely-to-pay management platform.

Consulting is based on trust: that trust is built day after day and is grounded in competence, empathy with your clients, value-driven behaviors, focus on breakthrough impact, and appetite for innovation

Giovanni started his career in the Capital Markets sector of the Italian branch of a leading US bank. After three years, he moved to the consulting sector, focusing immediately on financial services. He was immediately excited by the prospect of unlimited space to grow and the opportunity to learn "how to make the most difficult decisions in the most complex companies."

15 years into his consulting career, he temporarily changed course to work for an influential Italian bank. “The managerial experience made me grow and appreciate the complexity of companies as "seen from the inside,” but also definitively clarified what I really wanted: intellectual independence; diversity of people, cases, situations, clients, geographies; impact; and competition to improve myself and try to become the best while acknowledging that it is a lifetime project,” says Giovanni. “This is what consulting and Oliver Wyman offered to me.”

Strategic consulting, in his view, can take on many different forms — all of them aimed at delivering a substantial change through a nonconventional mobilization of the client’s capabilities. “The breakthrough can come through the transfer of innovative strategic thinking or superior methodology,” says Giovanni. “Or it can come by helping the client team converge on its priorities, or by providing acceleration to their plans at critical junctures, or by challenging their vision and way of thinking and doing things to find better ways.”

Along with the satisfaction he gets from helping clients, there are other important personal benefits. “My work has allowed me to develop some of the longest-standing relations in my life, whom I know will be there to help me when I need it,” says Giovanni. 

Beyond work, Giovanni is passionate about putting his abilities to work in social impact initiatives. “I’d like to enhance social mobility in my country — and continue to achieve ‘impossible’ performances with my bicycle!”