Digital Transformation

The number of companies listed on exchanges has declined over the last two decades. The growth of private markets and companies has led to new concerns over transparency, regulatory scrutiny, capital allocation, and reduced competition. What can companies do to ensure their strategy and transaction generate value?

Finding a balance between efficiency, competition, and accountability is critical to ensuring PE‑driven growth benefits investors, consumers, and wider society. This means adapting to the complexities of private markets to make informed decisions that drive sustainable growth and deliver returns, which often involves prioritising disclosure and adopting best practices to stay ahead of regulatory engagement. The right strategy will prioritise diverse funding sources, a focus on long‑term value creatin, investment in innovation and strategic transactions across mergers and acquisitions to build lasting resilience.

Specialisation across private equity funds

Activity across mergers and acquisitions continues to be strong, but PE funds are specialising more and more; for example some are focusing on certain geographies and sectors while others have extended the life of their funds out to the end of the century – well beyond the lifespans of their owners.

We believe the value creation story is at the heart of success. In a market where specialised funds are outperforming generalist funds at almost every stage of the investment lifecycle, you’ll need to be thinking beyond the value creation story of the business today to succeed. You’ll need to know what the value creation story of any acquired business will be four to five years down the line when it gets sold again, and you’ll need to understand it before the transaction even begins.

Overruns, delays and re scoping are common to any program failure. How can you create a pipeline for deployment where accountability is key?

Program failure is still extremely common and is rarely as explicit as a program being abandoned. Instead, it manifests in cost overruns, delays and re scoping exercises that mask ongoing redefinitions of success, leading to technology becoming outdated or redundant by the time it is deployed.

Execute at pace, front load benefit generation, and hold your business leaders accountable

Modularised program design and delivery accountability are critical to mitigating risks and maintaining a high velocity deployment pipeline that delivers incremental early value.

Done the right way, modularisation allows companies to reinstate single point accountability and ownership of business lines for delivery of individual program components associated with specific value outcomes – accountability that is often lost when implementation is delegated to monolithic technology divisions.

As demand for technology grows, so does the cost to deploy and maintain it. IT departments and tools play an increasingly critical role in a landscape where cost pressures are rising.

Advances in cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation are driving investment, but organisations must actively manage and optimise tech budgets to maximise value and avoid tech debt.

Our approach combines IT cost savings with optimisation to deliver lasting impact. Traditional levers like renegotiating service levels and contracts remain effective, but managing demand, reducing service costs, and leveraging existing capabilities are equally essential. Aligning your technology investments with business strategy—while eliminating unnecessary or excessive costs—ensures the best value outcome.

Creating stronger governance for Digital Project Success

Many digital project portfolios lack clear value and momentum, leading to delays, limited financial returns, and reputational risks. Additionally, new transactions often bring on new technology debt that needs to be managed before it leads to cost overruns and outdated tech stacks. Optimising your digital projects is key to securing returns on resources, minimising the impact of tech debt and accelerating execution.

We embed governance across the project lifecycle to boost velocity and quality—improving both business and employee experience. By streamlining your pipeline and engaging technical and operational stakeholders, we help you implement strategies that drive efficiency, manage dependencies, and ensure fit‑for‑purpose solutions.

Collecting data is of little benefit without a defined strategy to interpret and harness it for better decision making. The shift to becoming data‑driven rather than data‑consuming hinges on a single question: ‘What is the value we want to realise from our data?’

Data collection is a cheap commodity for many organisations today, to the point where they are overwhelmed by the volume and lack of quality and consistency. Clear use cases that drive tangible business value and realistic roadmaps of how to get there often do not exist. This results in time and money wasted and escalating scepticism about the potential benefits of investing in data.

Drive towards using your data, not hoarding it

We help clients define data strategies that start from the value they can generate, now and in the future, and then work backwards on how to get there in stages, recognising the shift to become a data‑driven organisation goes beyond merely collecting and processing data.

This involves an organisation wide cultural shift in decision‑making, creating clear and formalised knowledge of what information is relevant to a particular decision, empowering experienced operators to act rather than waiting for orders.

When deployed with care, AI and automation lead to an empowered workforce and an elevated, customer centric experience. Has your organisation considered how AI and automation can drive higher performance?

The nature of customer service has evolved to favour crisis‑response approaches as disruption looms around the globe. Organisations must be ready to manage changing customer demand.

Their options include reactive hiring sprees to boost back office capacity or automating suitable processes through AI. While the latter provides a fluid, cost effective result, it also brings its own challenges. Both require careful management – deploying an AI or automation process and walking away does not build trust in the solution, accountability or long term success.

Automation and AI are precision tools, not to be crudely implemented

Our approach to process transformation involves process redesign, leveraging the capabilities and benefits of automation and AI to improve customer service quality and workforce satisfaction.

Reducing transaction times and offering higher quality service can substantially improve their return on investment. Further, automation and AI remove the risk of human error from labour intensive, manual tasks – replacing them with predictable, consistent and timely processes.

Focused implementation frees up employee time and energy for cognitively demanding tasks, satisfying work that makes a tangible difference to organisational performance (i.e., complex problem solving and customer tailored service over routine tasks). Organisations can then focus on redeploying staff for continuous improvement. By blending automation, AI and behavioural change, organisations can drive enhanced productivity and build the ‘workforce of tomorrow’ – one that is digitally powered and human centric.