VDOS

The challenges of the new financial ecosystem

The traditional bank is experiencing a moment of reputational crisis, suffering a shift in the segments of younger population towards digital banking and in which business advisers are being substituted, slowly but surely, by new banking applications. In parallel, the pensions system is in more and more danger as the necessity to save and invest is increasing.
In addition to this, new players are appearing on the scene, specialised and streamlined startups which are taking a stance on the end investor, opting to fill the space with a B2C model.
VDOS is a company from the FinTech sector, an intermediary for information regarding investment, pension plans and SICAVs. VDOS captures information from fund managers and other sources, it compiles it, analyses it and adapts it in order to present it to their clients in an optimal and comprehensible manner. With twenty years of experience behind them, VDOS has been working in the institutional sector since its creation, albeit complemented with a parallel project focussed on the end client, which at times causes a conflict between both business lines.

Looking outwards as the main driving force for change

VDOS contacted Secuoyas in order to transform their current business and guide their value proposition outwards. This signified moving from an internal focus, centred on data and processes, to an external one, aimed at clients and the market.
They already had a good market position but they needed to update themselves, to organise themselves and to acquire flexibility when it came to their processes.
The challenge therefore centred around managing to transform their internal productive model in order to gain agility in the adaptation and creation of new products in a fast-moving context. In addition to this, we put forward the need to adopt a vision centred on the real user for each product which made it necessary to get to know more about the actors involved in the value chain.
Also, the exterior communication of this new direction was very important and needed to be enshrined in the design of their new corporate website.

Bringing investment closer to people

Making the financial sector more human

We began the strategic analysis by focussing on the internal aspect, that is to say, by developing a clear understanding of the company, the people and the dynamics that they formed. We worked through this phase by means of several sessions including personal interviews, fact sessions and tests on organizational culture.

The knowledge acquired in those sessions helped us to understand how the products that they had at that time had been designed and the logic behind them. It was highly complex and there was a certain confusion of identity between company, business line, products and functions. It became clear that rebranding work was necessary which scaled downwards and which generated a naming system for the products.

Once the existing portfolio and the internal work processes were understood, we approached the analysis of the exterior area, that is to say, understanding the market and the people who constituted it.
To do this we held several sessions with the management and business team in which we delved into the archetypes of the different clients from a value chain point of view. What is their occupation? What job do they need to do regarding the investment funds? Do they create the funds, promote them, buy or sell them?

A new image for a new strategy

The union and ordering of all of the questions that we had on the table offered us answers that, combined with the insights obtained in the facilitation sessions in which we worked on the product, we could see were turning into windows of opportunity and the right transformative levers in order to activate them.
The fruit of this work was a new business opportunities map and a route map which would serve as a guiding light for the transformation process which was getting started at that time.

Once the path to follow was established, work continued with intense rebranding which acted as a starting point for the design of the new website and all of the corporative material.

The development of the corporate website was the scene which was chosen in order to test the establishment of the new work processes, in which we played an accompanying role and where the weight of the work fell on the shoulders of the team. The objective was for them to gain the confidence and sufficient leader skills to integrate, once and for all, into their DNA the new work focus which had been developed over the previous months and that they could apply, when guided, new work formats which would enable them to draw closer to the reality of their context.
Basing themselves on streamlined methodologies, they established work teams with new roles, new ways of working and new tools and the result was reflected in their new website. VDOS was prepared for the change: it had achieved a new value proposition and was starting to show it to the outside world.