“We need to use this approach across the whole of our business”
Travelex
4 Consultants and Design Studio
Help Travelex take a business capability led approach to enabling functions transformation.
Jan 19 – Jul 19
Like a number of well-established businesses that held a dominant position in the market, Travelex was feeling the result of increased competition for retail foreign exchange, major brands bringing online exchange to major payments platforms and generally shrinking market. It recognized it needed to adapt to participate in the increasingly digital world. They’d found new ways of providing their core services in the digital world, but they’d been using old paradigms to deliver them. What resulted was new technologies sitting on old stacks, limited ability to grow and integrate their solutions and increasing duplication of business and application capabilities, processes and roles. With such complex problems to solve, Travelex engaged Konvergent to connect with Business leaders to open up conversations about business strategy, priorities and challenges in order to help deliver strategic Business roadmaps across their back-office functions.
With Konvergent’s help, Travelex have reviewed their business strategy and used it to make important decisions about investing in developing their organisation, processes, technologies and information use in their back office functions, thereby. We also provided the means to measure the value of future investment cases. Finally, the Travelex executive committee have learned the language of Business Capabilities and the value of implementing
the Travelex developed approach for the ongoing modernization of their organisation.
The work began in Finance, moved on to HR and then finished up with a proof of concept for rolling out beyond the back office. Konvergent led Travelex on a maturity journey for aligning strategy to its operational execution, leaving behind trained architects, proven methods and industry-leading models and assets.
Konvergent worked with senior Finance stakeholders to review and present a strategy for facing their complex challenges – including their seven GLs spread across the globe, over-complicated chart of accounts and a new operating model to be implemented. By focusing on demonstrating the power of introducing a Business Architecture led approach to EA at Travelex, Konvergent delivered a successful Business roadmap that provided a new way of approaching investment planning that linked initiatives to business strategy and business pain.
Whereas Travelex Finance needed a way forward for their core systems, HR were one step ahead having recently implemented a new HR tool. Our engagement with HR centered on helping HR align their recently revised operating model to their core business capabilities and overcoming the challenges felt across their organization and cross-cutting areas of responsibility
Travelex’s Chief Architect asked Konvergent to establish the Travelex Strategic view in order to provide an input to the newly developed investment governance process. This would both provide the investment committee with a strategic framework against which to judge investment case submissions, as well as delivering the objectives to be written into the investment cases – and, further down the road, against which they could be measured to ensure the objectives were delivered.
Travelex’s COO and Chief Architect were bold, innovative thinkers who relished their role in modernizing and transforming an ageing and underinvested organization. Whilst gaining traction and organizing within operations itself, the pair knew they needed to take these innovations further and wider within the organization in order to be truly effective. The final part of this launch, then, was the right comms and analysis to convince the executive committee and regional heads of business to accept some federated view of operations in order to transform and continue being relevant in an ever-moving digital world.
“We need to use this approach across the whole of our business”
Konvergent,
The Hoxton, 70 Colombo St,
London,
SE1 8DP
T: +44 (0)20 3744 1256
E: info@konvergent.co.uk