Operating model redesign

To stay competitive with digital-first disruptors amid evolving customer expectations, regulatory complexity, and rapid tech innovation, a payments incumbent transformed its static operating model. We partnered with the company to design a customer-centric model that replaced rigid functional silos, emphasizing clear decision-making frameworks and seamless collaboration between product and technology teams. Using our proprietary benchmarking database, Aster, the company assessed its talent structure against industry leaders to inform a best-in-class organizational design.

Key to the redesign’s success was adopting an evergreen strategy: Ongoing prioritization and resource allocation enabled the company to continually adapt to shifting market dynamics. Collectively, these strategic moves delivered a streamlined organization, faster decision making, and a sustainable competitive advantage in a rapidly changing industry.

Optimizing PMI

Drawing on our proven post-merger integration (PMI) playbook, we helped a leading European payment technology firm unlock over €300M in recurring cash synergies in IT, operations, and procurement. Our disciplined, three-phase PMI approach focused on early planning, rapid synergy capture, and long-term transformation.

We helped the company follow the money—or prioritize high-value synergies—and keep a laser focus on operational stability, business continuity, and change management amid rapid changes. By balancing quick wins with future readiness, the company built a scalable, competitive payments platform. As the industry continues to consolidate, this PMI approach offers a blueprint for successful integration from deal to delivery.

Results:

• €300M in recurring cash synergies
• Unified operating model and scalable, future-ready structure

Future-ready platform

Growth through multiple acquisitions left a global acquirer with many duplicative platforms, outdated technology, and a fragmented customer experience. These inefficiencies weren’t just technical—they were driving up costs and pushing away customers. We designed a multi-year modernization roadmap focused on standardizing product governance, building a scalable, future-ready architecture, and introducing event-driven processing and real-time payouts.

As a result of this work, the company has renewed growth, improved retention, and reduced tech maintenance costs—improvements that are already helping them better compete with tech-native payment disruptors.

Results:

• Increased growth and penetration in targeted segments
• Achieved multi-million-dollar savings

Journey mapping

Low R&D efficiency hindered a leading global payments processor’s ability to retain customers, drive innovation, and stay competitive. As part of a strategic shift to a product-led operating model, we mapped the company’s end-to-end customer journey, aligned on a future state, and prioritized the roadmap based on immediate merchant pain points and sequencing path to future state.

We redesigned merchant onboarding, engagement, and retention processes to deliver seamless, cohesive experiences, and embedded customer centricity throughout the product lifecycle. Crucially, we empowered teams to maintain new capabilities with codified playbooks for product discovery, design, and delivery. Not only did the company significantly improve merchant satisfaction and engagement—it also built a repeatable capability and a robust, scalable framework for continuous product innovation.

Results:

• Projected $100M annual revenue uplift
• Doubled digital engagement within key segments

Strategy support

After a financial investor acquired a leading digital payments provider, we delivered a detailed fact-based analysis to support strategic decision making, focusing on geographical and product expansion levers. For both its acquiring and issuing businesses in two key regions, we augmented our findings with secondary data and summarized the company’s point of departure, including its market and competitive positioning, financial performance, and current strategy.  

This market intelligence exercise enabled us to formulate informed decisions on strategic growth options, including value at stake, target segments, product focus, entry barriers, and actionable entry strategy options (including organic and external).