A mid-sized wealth management firm was spending roughly £600,000 a year on digital - split across three vendors, an internal team of four, and a growing list of software licences. Despite this spend, the Digital Director could not confidently answer a simple question from the board: what are we actually getting for our money?
Projects were being commissioned reactively. Each department had its own wishlist. The internal team spent most of its time firefighting rather than delivering anything strategic. There was no roadmap, no prioritisation framework, and no shared view of what 'good' looked like.
"We were spending half a million a year and could not tell the board what we were getting for it. The roadmap did not just prioritise our work - it gave us a common language to talk about digital investment. That changed the conversation in every board meeting that followed."
This was a pure strategy engagement. We did not build anything. We started with our 14-day assessment, which included stakeholder interviews with all 12 members of the leadership team, a review of every active and planned digital initiative, an audit of current vendor contracts and their deliverables, and an analysis of platform performance against business KPIs.
The assessment revealed three things. First, roughly 30% of current spend was going to maintenance and support for a legacy platform that was due for replacement - but nobody had committed to replacing it, so the costs kept accumulating. Second, two of the three external vendors were delivering overlapping work with no coordination. Third, the internal team's roadmap had 47 items on it with no clear prioritisation, which meant nothing was being finished.
We produced a three-year digital roadmap with clear phasing, estimated costs, and expected business outcomes for each phase. We recommended consolidating to a single external partner, decommissioning the legacy platform in phase one, and refocusing the internal team on content and analytics rather than development.
The firm adopted the roadmap and began implementation in the following quarter. The immediate impact was a reallocation of approximately £180,000 in annual spend from low-value maintenance to high-impact initiatives. The legacy platform was decommissioned within six months, and the vendor consolidation saved an additional £85,000 per year in management overhead.
More importantly, the leadership team reported that for the first time in three years, they had a shared understanding of what their digital investment was for and how it connected to business outcomes.
