Financial Services
RE-PLATFORMING FOR DIGITAL BUSINESS
The Challenge - A large leading global financial services organisation in the midst of a global business transformation needed to replace the core applications and supporting platform underpinning their whole multi-channel operation and driving their business growth. It had shortlisted solution vendors but was concerned its RFP didn't truly reflect its strategic digital business transformation objectives and was uncertain of the robustness of the tender responses.
The Work - Xaeus Blue worked closely with the key stakeholders helping them to clarify and clearly articulate their differentiating digital business aspirations and needs as well as gain a more objective and incisive assessment of the shortlisted solution vendor tender responses.
The Result - With the platform and application-set choice now made, the organisation is now able to simplify its existing product set whilst in parallel launch fresh new and innovative consumer products and services to the global marketplace at least 10 times faster than was previously possible within the organisation. The deeper integrated digital capabilities enable new ways to engage with customers and more objective ways of measuring marketing effectiveness utilising new performance marketing tools.
Travel
MULTI-BRAND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ACROSS EMEA
The Challenge - After Avis Budget in the US acquired Avis Budget Group in EMEA, a major EMEA-wide transformation was kicked off with Digital identified as an opportunity for significant commercial and customer service improvement.
The Work - Xaeus Blue helped to define the new EMEA digital and e-commerce strategy, formulate the end-to-end digital transformation programme, deliver the new EMEA multi-brand digital platform for rapid innovation and competitive differentiation and provide hands-on interim executive management support (as group digital director).
The Result - Customers were provided with a reimagined brand and user experience not normally associated with a car rental firm. In parallel, the brands experienced a significant uplift in online sales conversion of 250% above the target percentage improvement.
Technology
DUE DILIGENCE - DATA CENTRE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROVIDER
The Challenge - A large leading UK-based investment firm asked Xaeus Blue to assist with assessing a niche digital enterprise software products company in the large-scale data centre operations management and automation domain, a global, fast moving, highly fragmented and highly profitable market sector the investment was considering investing in for the first time.
The Work - Xaeus Blue carried out comprehensive technology and product due diligence and made recommendations to address strategic and operational technology, product management and product capability shortfalls / gaps and to contribute to value creation and acceleration.
As an extension to the due diligence exercise, Xaeus Blue conducted incisive bottom-up global data centre management target market analysis to validate currently targeted markets and to identify unexplored but immediately accessible data centre market opportunities. This was in marked contrast to the more generic and sparse view of the composite data centre management market, competitive space and future trends provided by reports purchased previously by the investment firm from multiple leading global market research firms.
The Result - The due diligence recommendations translated to a forecast sales lifecycle reduction of 30-40% and product development time reduction of 40-60% with the target data centre management market analysis identifying incremental revenue opportunities equating to 20-30% of initial forecast sales. In addition, Xaeus Blue provided an incisive up-to-date and detailed market assessment, realistic competitive market definition and assessment together with a considered data centre management software market evolution roadmap.
Retail
DIGITAL BUSINESS COMMERCIAL PERFORMANCE
The Challenge - A leading global retailer had a significant long-standing and un-explained discrepancy in digital channel commercial performance and effectiveness across its North American and European businesses.
The Work - Xaeus Blue conducted an investigation involving quantitative and qualitative analysis of the digital customer experience, commercial, merchandising, operational and technology considerations.
The Result - Xaeus Blue delivered a validated assessment of the root causes of the decade-long discrepancy with a structured benchmarked view of their digital business commercial performance compared to leading retailers across multiple sectors. Group executive were provided with specific cross-functional areas for focus and remediation.
Digital Agency / Professional Services
STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT - TRANSFORMING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMERS
The Challenge - The European arm of this large global digital agency and IT professional services firm with a global workforce of over 25,000 professional (a joint venture between a Top-5 NASDAQ-100 technology company and Top-100 S&P Global consulting firm) that serves multiple sectors across Europe/UK was grappling with how best to transform and extend its Digital division’s proposition, service offerings, capabilities, GTM channels and touchpoints in a highly competitive international landscape.
It wished to re-invent itself needing a solid vision, foundations and independently validated Digital Services strategy to becoming the leading European digital innovator across multi-billion dollar enterprise sectors whilst enabling highly accelerated digital services revenue growth and optimising co-selling pipelines with its parent corporations.
It wanted to identify and execute on the right things to achieve the “go big” ambitions of the European business.
The Work - Xaeus Blue worked closely and quickly with the European CEO, her Europe-wide sector and service line executive Heads and Leads, to facilitate definition of a compelling shared vision and a validated, coherent and actionable Digital Services strategy tightly aligned to this vision.
The co-defined and validated strategy facilitated the definition of compelling new client services for transformative Digital Strategy, Consulting, Innovation, Solutioning, Architecture and Delivery alongside Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning, Cloud, Automation and Cybersecurity services targeting an expanded set of sectors and segments across Europe and UK, namely, Retail (Supermarkets, Grocery, Department Stores, Fashion, Luxury Goods, Mass Merchandise), CPG, Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Media (Television, Broadcasting, Live Entertainment), Telco, Energy, Utilities (Water, Gas, Electricity), Manufacturing (Automotive, Aerospace, High Tech, Electronics & Semiconductors), Industrial and Sports (Professional Sports Teams, Stadiums & Venues, Elite Sporting Events).
This was coupled with a practical approach for quickly bridging internal capability gaps particularly around advanced analytics, machine learning, hyper-immersive experiences (VR), adaptive connected spaces (Internet of Things/IoT), emerging user centred design techniques, scaled lean-agile delivery, go-to-market strategy and organisational structure.
The Result - Xaeus Blue's recommendations included radical changes to measuring and managing success based on service-profit chain concepts that linked employee engagement to profitability and client retention, together with client bid lifecycle optimisation conservatively estimated at increasing client bid win rates by 50-70% on high value opportunities.
The resulting structural frameworks supported a 30% year-over-year business growth rate for the European arm of the business, laying the groundwork for the European executive leadership team's advancement including the European CEO's promotion to global CEO and her transition to a global technology provider as chief AI transformation officer - a distinguished career that culminated in the receipt of a UK royal honour for outstanding services to business and technology.
Healthcare
DUE DILIGENCE - CONNECTING HOSPITALS, HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS, SPECIALISTS AND PATIENTS
The Challenge - A London-headquartered venture capital firm wished to better understand the investment opportunity with a healthcare technology venture. The target business provided a cloud (SaaS) based medical information exchange service that enables interchange of medical data amongst relevant stakeholders including care givers, hospitals, healthcare providers, specialists, radiologists and health insurance providers including remote patient monitoring and the ability to integrate screening devices. The service was live and running on an international basis across multiple countries (including UK, Asia, North America and Australia) and healthcare organisations. Core to the business was a globally distributed R&D team using advanced patented data management, delivery and encryption technology it had developed particularly for managing medical imaging data.
The Work - The venture capital firm engaged Xaeus Blue who worked with the target business executive leadership to carry out due diligence on the technology, product and competitive market facets of the business.
The observations and recommendations made by Xaeus Blue included specific product, feature, usability, technology, integration, security, performance, development process, operational, org structure, regulatory and competitive space considerations.
The Result - The observations and recommendations delivered by Xaeus Blue enabled the venture capital firm to better shape and focus its strategic investment approach and provided the healthcare technology venture with specific improvement areas to radically improve usability, user productivity and service platform scalability whilst dropping its operating costs by 30% .
Fintech
DUE DILIGENCE - ADVANCED PATENTED FINTECH TECHNOLOGY
The Challenge - A global venture capital and investment advisory firm had a unique opportunity within Fintech, one of its primary focal sectors. The technology and platform provided by the UK-headquartered fintech player was already in use by a number of leading multi-national organisations taking advantage of the tech/platform market leading capabilities and high performance. The venture capital firm wanted to look more closely at the fintech technology, products, processes, team and competitive space. The fintech company in turn was seeking the venture capital firm's support to build up and mature its development capability, to push into new market sub-segments and expand its international activities.
The Work - The mandate for Xaeus Blue was technology, product and market due diligence on the fintech organisation. Xaeus Blue worked closely with the venture capital firm and the fintech organisation’s senior executive team paying particular attention to the advanced patented fintech technology at the core of the business as well as the team, org structure, infrastructure and processes supporting it.
The Result - Xaeus Blue gave the VC firm the further clarity and insights it required regarding the fintech company as well as advising on significantly broader application and innovation with the technology within and outside the financial services market.
Investment Management
SECTOR INVESTMENT - INVESTING IN SMART HOME/PROPERTY AUTOMATION AND HEALTHCARE MONITORING
The Challenge - A leading global investment management firm had numerous investment options within the Internet of Things (IoT) space, particularly around smart/intelligent home automation, property/building automation and remote healthcare monitoring. The Australian regional office leading the investment opportunity investigation needed help with better understanding these areas, the opportunity and how best to execute on their strategic space / sector investment thesis.
The Work - Xaeus Blue worked with the Australian investment management team helping to dissect the Internet of Things space, tease out the smart/intelligent home automation, property/building automation and remote healthcare monitoring technologies and identify the related markets, the associated market opportunity, risks and pitfalls.
Xaeus Blue subsequently helped the investment management firm determine how it could best support such business ventures and how it could practically and objectively evaluate and narrow down a prospective target ventures field to the best venture options to back.
The Result - Xaeus Blue provided the Australian investment management team with the understanding they required coupled with advice around the investment strategy including acquisition/investment options, preferred technology and innovation hotspots/hubs around the world to target, global and regional market entry strategy, product strategy, channels to market and product / offering bundling through partner organisations.
Xaeus Blue provided the investment management team with a bespoke business venture evaluation framework based on preferred target venture selection criteria covering: underpinning technology stacks, technical standards, architecture, product lifecycle, product quality attributes, venture team culture, design and engineering mindset as well as tech & operational scalability, security and compliance considerations.
