Digital Innovation

Digital challenger bank

Building a new greenfield digital challenger bank for a non-financial services industry group

A global leader, in telecom, content, media, entertainment and advertising, embarked on an initiative to launch a digital challenger bank to enable a conversion strategy of the group’s large client base to offer retail and SME banking services (from current accounts, payments, small value credit facilities, etc.) and thereby add an active retention approach for their existing non-banking core franchise. As the program suffered from multiple delays, changes in scope and mounting issues with vendors, the management questioned the overall strategy, market fit and ability to deliver the digital challenger bank.

What did we do?

After an initial short-term end to end programme assessment by our subject matter experts across various domains (banking, delivery, technology, architecture, etc.) we developed a recovery approach to address various short falling areas – from defined product/services strategy to operating model (run the bank) to programme structure and governance as well as general flaws in underlying technology architecture and chosen vendor stacks. The combination of these significant risks with respect to time to market, market scalability, onboarding performance, business continuity, etc. required a major redesign across all areas to recover and turn the endeavor towards success.

What we delivered:

Provide key observations and detailed recovery plan and roadmap including financial implications and investments to management team and executive board and to also satisfy regulator approval needs

Revised technology architecture blueprint to feature a flexible API-enabled approach to onboard and manage 3rd party services and technology vendors

A revised two-pronged customer conversion strategy with related cross-functional domain features to drive banking product and service adoption addressing specific customer segment needs

Business benefits:

Clear roadmap and plan with realistic market launch date for board and management

A banking product and services proposition that fully uses challenger-role enabled opportunities

Technology platform strategy that supports set growth ambitions and market coverage