The challenge
A leading U.K. financial planning and wealth management business was operating in a sector where regulatory scrutiny and rising client expectations are reshaping how value is defined — not just in outcomes but also in how transparently and consistently value is delivered.
Despite having achieved scale, the business was struggling to translate that scale into consistent commercial performance. Proposition and pricing had evolved incrementally through growth and acquisition, creating fragmentation across client segments and limiting visibility into where value was truly being created — and where it was being lost.
The core challenge was not designing a better pricing structure in isolation but realigning the entire commercial model. Pricing, proposition and cost to serve were interconnected yet misaligned, making it difficult to balance client value, regulatory requirements and profitability. Without addressing this, the business risked leaving significant value unrealized within its existing client base while increasing operational complexity over time.
Our approach
The focus was to establish a clear, integrated view of how value was created across the business and where it could be improved.
This required moving beyond existing structures to understand how different client segments were served, how services translated into cost and how pricing reflected both value delivered and operational reality. A key challenge was reconciling multiple perspectives — customer expectations, cost to serve, competitive positioning and regulatory requirements — into a single coherent framework.
By linking service delivery to cost and aligning this with customer willingness to pay, we identified where the existing model was structurally misaligned. This enabled a more consistent pricing architecture across the value chain while also highlighting where proposition complexity was driving inefficiency rather than differentiation.
At the same time, the work surfaced additional sources of value, particularly through cross-selling across financial planning, investment management and funds as well as opportunities to optimize the fund management operating model. These insights were brought together into a clear, sequenced pathway for implementation, ensuring that value could be realized in a controlled and practical manner.
Results
Addressing this challenge gave the client a clear, actionable view of how to unlock value from its existing business. It created transparency regarding where value was being generated across client segments and propositions, enabling more targeted and confident commercial decisions.
By aligning pricing, proposition and cost to serve into a coherent structure, the business was able to balance client value, regulatory requirements and profitability more effectively. At the same time, it sharpened its growth engine through clearer cross-sell pathways and improved alignment across financial planning, investment management and funds.
Simplifying the proposition reduced operational complexity and improved scalability, while a defined implementation roadmap ensured that these changes could be delivered in a controlled and practical manner.
With L.E.K. Consulting’s support, the client established a clear understanding of the commercial opportunity within its existing business and defined a structured approach to deliver value through proposition, pricing and operating model improvements.
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