Consulting Spend Audit: Financial Services Firm

TL;DR: A mid-size financial services firm with no centralised view of its consulting portfolio engaged Scopecreeper to map £28M in annual spend across 12 cost codes. Within six weeks, 140 active engagements had been identified, 18% of spend had been flagged for recovery, and three supplier relationships had been consolidated.

Background

[Placeholder] The client is a mid-size financial services firm with operations across the UK and Europe. Consulting spend had grown steadily over five years but had never been mapped as a single portfolio. Finance tracked invoices against cost codes. Procurement managed preferred supplier agreements. The business managed relationships directly. Nobody had visibility of all three at once.

When the CFO asked for a consolidated view ahead of a board cost review, the internal estimate of £22M in annual consulting spend turned out to be materially wrong. The actual figure, once all cost codes were mapped, was £28M — a 27% discrepancy that had persisted undetected for at least two years.

What Scopecreeper did

[Placeholder] Scopecreeper ingested three years of invoice data across all cost codes and built a consolidated engagement map. Each engagement was matched to a supplier, a project lead, and a cost code. Where data was missing — project status, scope boundaries, current delivery stage — Scopecreeper's agent reached out to project leads directly through Teams to collect it.

Within four weeks, 140 active engagements had been catalogued. Rate benchmarking identified 14 engagements where day rates were above market for the type of work and seniority level. Scope analysis flagged 6 engagements where spend had continued beyond the original contract end date with no formal renewal.

Outcomes

[Placeholder] Acting on Scopecreeper's recommendations, the client recovered 18% of annual spend through a combination of rate renegotiations, scope terminations, and supplier consolidations. Three supplier relationships doing overlapping work were merged into a single preferred arrangement. Two engagements running past their end dates were formally closed.

The CFO now receives a weekly summary of active engagements, budget consumption against milestones, and any rate or scope anomalies flagged since the previous report. The board cost review used Scopecreeper's portfolio view as its primary data source.

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