In January 2020, leading financial service provider Legal & General (L&G) created a new business (LGRS) to consolidate its customer offerings across the retirement lifecycle. LGRS was created from three existing entities – Workplace Pensions, Retirement Income, and Personal Investments. Each had their own plans, visions, and existing IT estates. A unified technology strategy was required to support the needs of the combined organisation.
How did Wavestone help?
To undertake this exercise LGRS required an independent partner who had the required expertise, proven methodology, and supporting accelerators. As a long-standing, trusted advisor to L&G, with a track record in technology strategy, Wavestone was chosen to deliver this significant project.
Wavestone deployed a core team to answer two key questions: Where should LGRS invest in IT to support its business goals and generate synergies? When should LGRS invest in each area to support the transformation?
Our approach
Andy Boyes
Partner Wavestone
London office
The foundation of any technology strategy is understanding the key drivers of it. We took a business-led approach in defining LGRS’s IT vision and supporting roadmap.
Wavestone created a 4 phase workstream plan with LGRS that focused on the business outcomes and the technologies required to enable them:
The core purpose of Discovery was to understand the ecosystem – specifically, how IT supported the existing businesses and what gaps needed to be addressed. It involved building a consistent picture across all three existing technology estates.
Outcome: A single vision of the current IT state and heatmap assessment.
In this work stream, Wavestone worked with the executive management of LGRS to identify the key business drivers for the newly formed organization. These drivers were vital in enabling the strategy to be shaped in a way that supported the business vision and goals.
Outcome: Five business drivers focused on onboarding, customer experience, customer intimacy across the retirement stages, product innovation, and cost synergies.
Wavestone determined the target capabilities required to support the business ambition. We ran a series of workshops with relevant stakeholders in IT, commercial teams, Operations, and Marketing, to gather a range of inputs. As part of this exercise, Wavestone also provided insight on key technology topics, such as Data and CRM.
Outcome: A five-year IT vision, describing the target capabilities and platforms that supported the business drivers, with underlying architectural principles.
Finally, building on the previous work, a roadmap was created to define the key projects. These projects were prioritised and sized, to build the most efficient implementation sequence. This ensured the roadmap was realistic and delivered the benefits as early as possible, while reducing the need for tactical solutions and rework.
Outcome: A roadmap that clarified the five-year transformation journey for LGRS, ensuring the most efficient sequence of work.
Key success factors
Throughout the engagement, Wavestone and LGRS worked in close partnership. We jointly managed the balance between engaging stakeholders appropriately and the need to make decisions rapidly. Key factors in doing this successfully were having:
- Unified technology and business working groups to drive progress
- A small core team to consolidate, digest, and make decisions
- Engaged, senior-level, sponsors and stakeholders – to steer and ratify decisions
- Business engagement through workshops, to share ideas and build the vision
Stakeholders at all levels actively contributed to the strategy and their feedback was considered and acted on. This ensured buy-in to the outcomes from across the business.
Results
Wavestone created a clear, actionable, five-year technology blueprint that was supported by IT and business stakeholders – and subsequently endorsed by the Group CEO and CFO. Our partnership approach resulted in LGRS owning the technology strategy, rather than it being something created by Wavestone.
"We’re delighted with the support provided by Wavestone: working collaboratively with our in-house teams, to assess and then formalise our technology strategy; and ensuring it aligns with and underpins our business ambitions." Steve Davis, Director of Strategy, Planning & Implementation, LGRS
LGRS is now using this blueprint to execute its technology-investment decisions through the development of a cohesive set of delivery plans. Wavestone continues to support LGRS in scoping and launching the major programs that will realise the benefits of the strategy.
