A new Business Value Framework is driving a culture shift for Vanquis

The client

About Vanquis

Vanquis Bank, part of one of the UK and Ireland’s most experienced home credit lending businesses Provident Financial Group, is the leading provider of credit cards to customers in the non-standard credit market. It promotes financial inclusion by providing people with the opportunity to access credit where it might otherwise not be available.

The business is focused on supporting customers to build their credit history. To continue to deliver on this, it is investing in a number of new digital transformation initiatives, such as modern money management tools.

A framework to ensure focus and measure impact

Helping Vanquis assess the value of innovation

Vanquis' Scaling Digital department wanted to create a Business Value Framework to guide and assess the value of their activities and ensure that any future development work was fully focussed on customer and colleague impact and commercial value.

While working with AND Digital in the early stages of their digital transformation programme, the Digital Strategy and Innovation team - led by Head of Digital Transformation, Sol Enenmoh - realised that both organisations were “talking a similar language around new ways of working and creating the fabric for progress”.

With AND Digital starting to institute new vocabulary in the team and introducing new ways of working, Sol wanted to both empower his team and provide a new baseline for growth across the entire Business.

In Spring 2021, Sol approached AND Digital to help Vanquis create a Business Value Framework to:

Identify metrics that matter as Vanquis shapes up to transform into a Digital-first business.
Build a specific scorecard to measure the effectiveness of innovation as it emerged.

This would ultimately provide a baseline to measure where the organisation was at on its transformation journey. In turn, this would open up honest conversations about how to change while also keeping stakeholders honest and accountable for delivering outcomes.

The approach

Identifying a North Star

Aligning the organisational vision to focus on impact

The ‘North Star’ metric was defined as the one core measure at the heart of the team’s effectiveness and, following the extensive groundwork, this was established as the percentage of Vanquis customers that were digital-only. Together, the AND and Vanquis team went on to establish the innovation scorecard to help the organisation determine the projects that were going to drive the most benefit to the organisation.

Agreeing the key framework tenets

A detailed, collaborative period of activity took the Vanquis team smoothly through the AND Digital process to agree on the key framework tenets: the Value Statement, North Star Metric, and Key Inputs.

Education and Exploration

AND Digital began the process with education and exploration. To facilitate the education phase, the AND Digital team created explanatory documents and provided Vanquis with a deck explaining the methodology and output of a Value Framework.

Interview and Workshops

AND Digital went on to undertake a series of interviews and workshops with key stakeholders (across multiple functions, not just the digital department) to understand how extensively digital could impact the business and identify the changes needed to make it happen.

Analysis and Research

AND Digital analysed background documents and brought the team together in a series of remote, collaborative, white board workshops, pre-populating frames on a white board with themes drawn from a synthesis of the interviews and document review.

Impact

Achieving business-wide benefit

A digital mindset rippling across the whole organisation

AND Digital’s independence and expertise allowed Vanquis to take a step back from day-to-day operations and adopt a more objective view of the necessary drivers for change.

One aspiration for the Value Framework was for measures to feed into wider executive reporting metrics, while also being used by the digital department.

While this has indeed happened, a further and somewhat unexpected bonus has emerged: the Value Framework is now being used across the entire business. The model has been used to provide structure, tracking, and target-setting as well as applying greater rigour to their outputs.

The way that the digital department is influencing the approach and culture of the bank in this way is both fitting for a digital-first business and helps to lend weight to the function overall.

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How a new Business Value Framework is driving a culture shift for Vanquis

About Vanquis

A framework to ensure focus and measure impact

Identifying a North Star