Sharper revenue insight with a leaner FinTech tech stack

Like many fast-growing FinTechs, this client had scaled quickly by adding tools and customisations wherever the business needed speed. Over time, that agility became a problem. A heavily customised Salesforce CPQ implementation and overlapping applications shattered the "single customer view" that leadership relied on, while licensing and infrastructure costs spiralled.

Sales, service and revenue operations all had different versions of the truth. Commercial performance conversations bogged down in arguments over numbers, and simple questions about pipeline, churn or lifetime value required stitching together reports from multiple systems. Meanwhile, the CFO needed a credible cost-reduction plan that didn't throttle growth.

Brought in as programme lead within the consulting partner, I was asked to design and run a revenue and customer data transformation spanning Salesforce CRM, NetSuite and a new data platform. The aim was to simplify the technology landscape, restore a trusted single customer view, and put the company on a more scalable footing for its next phase of growth.

I mobilised a blended GoCardless/Socium team of 50+ people across three workstreams: a CPQ reimplementation business case, a governed BI and reporting blueprint, and licensing rationalisation. Together we shaped a new revenue Target Operating Model that connected sales, service and finance around shared processes, data and metrics – rather than each function optimising in isolation.

To tackle the problem in a controlled way, we started with clarity: what exactly should "single customer view" mean for this business? I worked with the Transformation Lead and senior stakeholders to define a reference architecture and data model that followed the merchant lifecycle from first touch through onboarding, expansion and renewals. That became the north star for every decision across the three workstreams.

On the CPQ side, we assessed the existing implementation, catalogued customisations and workarounds, and mapped how those choices were breaking reporting and downstream processes. From there, we built a business case to reimplement CPQ in a more standard, sustainable way – one that would support future growth instead of locking the company into brittle, expensive custom logic.

In parallel, I led the design of a governed data and reporting strategy. We agreed KPI and metric definitions, mapped ownership, and produced an initial set of dashboards so executives could finally see consistent commercial numbers across sales, service and finance. The focus wasn't just tooling; it was making sure people trusted the numbers in front of them.

The third stream tackled cost and complexity head-on. We audited the application and licensing estate, identified duplication and under-used tools, and developed recommendations that unlocked £1.3m in technology simplification benefits. At the same time, I designed delivery resource models, team structures and a centralised change function so the organisation could keep improving the stack without falling back into ad hoc, siloed change.

By the end of the engagement, the client had not only a roadmap and business cases, but a coherent operating model and reporting backbone – a single revenue story instead of a collection of disconnected systems.