A bank recently engaged Coeus Consulting to help develop a cost-effective agreement with a digital partner

Professionals from Coeus Consulting have helped a client in the banking sector find a digital partner, who will help modernise the bank’s core platform to adapt for the challenger bank market. In order to facilitate this, the consultancy helped draw up a rigorous contract for the partnership, as well as ensuring a competitive selection process to ensure value for money.

Throughout the banking new challenger banks and FinTechs are attacking business models, with newcomers rapidly making inroads into the sector’s profits by offering agile, digitalised alternatives. In retail banking, the disruption of challenger banks is visible across the value chain, from customer contact and lending to mortgages, payments and alternative financing. At the same time, the likes of Monzo, Starling and TSB have all launched a marketplace banking offering. In response to this, many traditional banks have looked to protect their market share by collaborating with digitally savvy startups, rather than fighting them.

As the UK’s financial sector continues to change rapidly, a bank with a traditional heritage recently engaged Coeus Consulting to help develop a cost-effective and robust agreement with a digital partner. This could facilitate the bank’s modernisation of its core banking platform and IT services model, and adapt it for rapid growth in the challenger bank market. As well as looking to expand, however, it also needed to address the high levels of uncertainty for a challenger bank’s digital journey – with many challengers still struggling to win business from historic banks.

Coeus is an independent IT advisory that empowers technology, business and procurement leaders to deliver strategic change to the business. Through 2020 Coeus Consulting has taken on a raft of further transformation projects, including helping Southend-on-Sea Borough Council address various digital challenges relating to the Covid-19 lockdown, and helping a prestigious London university to up its digital performance, in response to social distancing measures in Britain.