Consulting Portfolio Rationalisation: European Retail Bank

TL;DR: A European retail bank with around €1.5B in revenue and 10,000 employees was three years into a multi-workstream regulatory transformation — Basel, AML, and operational resilience. €65M in consulting spend across 5 workstreams, 30+ suppliers, and 180+ engagements, with no consolidated view at the engagement level. A structured rationalisation delivered €7.4M in annualised savings without disrupting the core programme.

Background

The bank's steering committee had line-of-sight to total consulting cost by workstream, but no visibility into what was being bought within each one. Individual workstream leads managed their own supplier relationships. As the programme grew over three years, so did the number of engagements — often without a corresponding review of what was already in place.

By the time the steering committee asked for a portfolio view, spend had grown well beyond the original programme budget. Nobody could say precisely which engagements were active, which had ended, or which were overlapping. Three years into the programme was not an easy moment to look hard at the consulting portfolio — but the alternative was continuing to pay for work that wasn't being managed.

What we did

Building a portfolio view

We mapped all 180+ engagements across the five workstreams, matching invoices to contract documents and confirming active status with workstream leads. For the first time, the steering committee had a single view: every engagement, every supplier, current status, contracted end date, and spend to date.

Stopping and merging overlapping work

Three workstreams had overlapping scope — separate suppliers doing materially similar work under different programme labels. One engagement had been running for 14 months past its original contract end date with no formal renewal and no named owner. These were stopped or consolidated, releasing €3.4M in annualised spend.

Rate consolidation

Rate benchmarking across the supplier base showed a 35–50% variance for equivalent roles — partly because different workstreams had negotiated independently, and partly because rates had drifted as engagements extended. The top two suppliers accounted for 40% of total spend. Renegotiating rates with these two, and consolidating scope from smaller suppliers into preferred arrangements, produced €2.8M in savings.

Supplier scorecard and renewal governance

We introduced a supplier scorecard covering delivery quality, responsiveness, and value for money, used to inform renewal decisions. Two suppliers with consistently poor scores were not renewed at the end of their contract periods. The governance process also established a requirement for competitive review above a spend threshold at each renewal. Savings from exits and improved renewal terms: approximately €1.2M.

Outcomes

€7.4M in annualised savings. Supplier scorecard embedded in renewal governance. Steering committee with engagement-level visibility for the first time since the programme began.

What made it work

The steering committee's willingness to stop a live programme — not restructure it or reduce scope, but actually stop it — was the most important factor. Without that, the overlap analysis would have produced a recommendation nobody acted on. The second factor was running supplier conversations jointly between procurement and programme management, so suppliers couldn't play one side against the other. The third was timing: starting the review with enough lead time before the next renewal cycle that commercial conversations could happen without the constraint of an imminent deadline.

This engagement was conducted before Scopecreeper existed — with a consulting team working across the bank's programme and procurement functions over several months. It's the kind of work Scopecreeper now runs continuously, without the consulting team. Get in touch →