Regulated sectors are where we learned the trade, and the standard they impose is higher than most industries set for themselves. Measured baselines. Evidence retained as the work is done, not reconstructed afterwards. Controls sized to real risk rather than to a policy document. None of that is specific to financial services or gaming — it is simply how good change is run, and it travels with us into any industry.
Financial Services
Digital and core-system transformation, and regulatory-driven change. 2026 is a demanding year: regulatory change is selective, slow and fragmented rather than uniform, which is harder to plan against than a single deadline. Firms face a more complex, globally fragmented environment with direct implications for strategy, risk appetite and governance.
For mid-sized firms the problem is rarely awareness. It is capacity — a change portfolio sized for a stable regulatory environment, now absorbing continuous obligation. Our work is usually about sequencing: which changes are genuinely mandatory by when, which are being treated as mandatory but are not, and where regulatory work can be combined with modernisation you needed anyway rather than run as a parallel programme competing for the same people.
Payments
Platform and scheme change, fraud and risk analytics. The sector is carrying both digital innovation and regulatory reform simultaneously, against firm dates: ISO 20022 adoption by November 2026, replacing legacy MT messaging with XML-based formats, and changes to e-money and payments firm requirements taking effect in May 2026.
ISO 20022 is instructive because it is so often mis-scoped. Treated as a messaging format change it is a technical project. Treated correctly it is a data opportunity — richer structured data flowing through the estate, with consequences for fraud analytics, reconciliation and reporting that most migration plans never budget to exploit.
A compliance deadline met with the minimum viable change is a deadline met twice: once now, and again when someone asks why the data is still not usable.
Private Equity and Venture Capital
Technology due diligence, value creation and portfolio support. Scrutiny of private markets is intensifying — the Bank of England is running a focused exercise covering private credit, private equity and related markets in 2026 — and the strongest deal rationales now combine capital efficiency, technology capability, regulatory readiness and a credible integration path.
Our diligence work asks a narrower question than most: not whether the technology works, but whether it survives the thesis. A platform performing adequately at current volume, with a customisation history that makes upgrade unsafe, is a different asset from one that scales. That distinction rarely appears in a standard technology diligence report and it routinely appears in the second year of the hold.
Post-deal, value creation with the same discipline we apply everywhere: named initiatives, instrumented baselines, and an honest view of which are achievable inside the hold period. More on PE and VC advisory →
Retail and Consumer
Omnichannel transformation and supply-chain optimisation. The recurring pattern here is ambition outrunning foundations: personalisation and omnichannel strategies that keep meeting the same wall of fragmented, untrusted customer data.
Customer data platforms have matured past their marketing-technology origins into genuine data infrastructure, which helps — but only where the underlying data is sound. Buying the platform first is the most common and most expensive sequencing error in the sector. Getting personalisation visibly wrong is worse than not attempting it. More on data architecture →
Gaming
Platform and operational change, technology strategy. A sector with an unusual combination: consumer-grade experience expectations, financial-services-grade regulatory obligation, and release cadences neither of the other two would recognise.
The interesting problems are usually at that intersection — how to keep shipping at pace without the controls becoming a release gate, and how to demonstrate to a regulator that speed has not cost you oversight. That is a DevSecOps problem before it is a compliance one. More on DevSecOps →
If your sector is not on this list
Sector knowledge is not a marketing claim. It is the difference between arriving with questions and arriving with context, and in regulated industries it is the difference between a recommendation that survives scrutiny and one that does not.
Where we have that context, you get it from the first meeting. Where we do not, we will say so — and the standard still applies, because most of what derails a programme is not sector-specific. An operating model that no longer fits. A data foundation nobody trusts. A business case with no measured baseline. Those behave the same way in every industry.
In these sectors the first conversation starts with context rather than discovery. Outside them, it starts with the same question: what is this measurably costing you?