Innovating in the field of Digital Payments

The challenge

Our client, a business with a 30-year history centred around Tax Free, fuelled by a 2017 acquisition of a New York based Payments business, was seeking to position itself more centrally into the Payments space.

Their target proposition - a “one-stop-shop” acquiror-processor for merchants with a high mix of international customers – seeks to maximise cross-sell and increase “customer stickiness”.

This strategy required a more digitally enabled business and one which holds data at the core.

Culturally, the organisation has a diverse mix of heritage tax free DNA coupled with Payments people and is generally digitally immature.

Bandwidth for the more expansive digital transformation agenda (incl ecommerce and data) is limited and internal competences in short supply.

Our client sought a partner (ESHER) to drive momentum and help translate the” PowerPoint vision” into a cogent, prioritised plan and business case.

Approach

The initial challenge would be to shift thinking beyond the high level (the client had developed a ‘product vision’ in Powerpoint format). The product visualisation was untested so the first critical step would be to ground the opportunity in real world potential through a robust, multi-stage feasibility study.

We put user stories at the core of our approach. The study was designed to achieve a number of user-related objectives including identification of clear target customers with credible and desirable personas, definition of concrete user stories, and identification of pain points. We also undertook commercial sizing in order to prioritise the rollout by user groups.

At the same time as planning for feasibility, we undertook a thorough diagnostic review to better understand the client’s broader situation and capabilities. This included reviewing existing collateral and research, conducting key senior stakeholder interviews, evaluation of technology and rough sizing of addressable revenue pools.

The next phase of the study involved intensive data gathering and checking. Data was employed to validate every aspect of our user-centric approach. It also allowed us to workshop and prioritise user stories by value. Doing so enabled us to recap the overall vision and meant we could propose a ‘prioritisation’ approach. We workshopped core user stories to determine which to take forward into more detailed design.

With data-validated user stories in place, we moved on to detailed product definition and design. We built in-depth understanding of use cases and requirements, validated them with customers and assessed their complexity to arrive at a prioritised rollout recommendation - now, next or later.

Finally we workshopped the tech handover process, walking through core stories, holding Q&A around requirements and looking at resourcing options. We confirmed releases and dependencies and helped to assess readiness. The overall objective here was to inform the business case approach.

Impact

Prioritisation of rollout

clear use cases and requirements enabled the tech team to group, size and assess their internal ability to deliver, critical to planning rollout.

Sales team engagement

we successfully engaged the sales organisation, offering them more to sell and cross sell and providing them with a clear point of difference against competitors.

Digital investment prioritised

our approach created wider organisational buy-in to the digital strategy which, in turn, resulted in that investment being prioritised.

Moved the strategic agenda forward

we shifted the exec conversation on to ‘how to build delivery capabilities’.