Creating tailored banking packages to drive growth
Helping a mutual bank align its leadership and reshape its offer around life-stage packages for essential service workers.
Impact:
Aligned the Board and Executive Leadership Team (ELT), who unanimously endorsed the growth strategy, eliminating strategic ambiguity
Validated a differentiated product direction through member testing of life stage packages over generic low-rate offers
Enabled the internal team to lead implementation using governance and decision-making frameworks we co-created
Timeframe: 12 months
Services provided:
Strategy
Growth strategies
Product, service and experience strategies
Design
Concept creation
Prototype testing
Implementation and delivery
Capability Building
Bespoke workshop facilitation
On-project training
Deliverables:
Growth strategy and prioritised roadmap of strategic initiatives that gave the Board and ELT a shared direction for investment and delivery
Life-stage product and service package concepts that translated the strategy into offers members could understand and value
Strategic initiative framework and implementation governance model that enabled the internal team to lead execution confidently
Context:
Banking providers often struggle to stay differentiated when product portfolios gradually expand in ways that mirror the broader market.
Our client, a specialised mutual bank serving essential service workers, had begun to experience this challenge. Its product offering had drifted toward a more generalist position, making it harder to stand apart from larger banks while still serving the specific needs of its member base. At the same time, the Board and Executive Leadership Team (ELT) had not yet aligned on which growth direction to pursue or how to turn ambition into a practical roadmap.
This created a strategic risk. Without a shared direction, the organisation risked investing in offers that diluted its niche rather than strengthening it. It needed a clearer, evidence-led path to differentiation, backed by leadership alignment and a delivery approach the internal team could carry forward.
WAVE was engaged to help the Board and ELT align on a growth strategy, define a differentiated product direction, and equip the organisation to deliver it.
Approach:
We began by bringing the Board and ELT together through a series of intensive workshops designed to move discussion from broad debate to practical decision-making. Rather than treating strategy as a document to approve at the end, we used the workshop process to help leaders test ideas together, challenge assumptions, and build a shared understanding of where the bank could create the most value. This process helped the leadership team define and commit to a common strategic direction centred on its bonded community.
Once that direction was clear, we translated it into product and service concepts that were grounded in members’ real lives. Instead of continuing to think in terms of standalone products, we developed tailored packages linked to key career and life stages, including concepts tailored to members at the Academy, actively in the Force, and approaching retirement. This shifted the conversation from products the bank wanted to sell, to support members would find useful. It also helped the client respond to needs that generic competitors were less equipped to address, such as income variability linked to overtime or posting cycles.
We then focused on helping the organisation take ownership of delivery. We worked with the internal team to design a governance and strategic initiative framework built around desirability, viability, and feasibility. This gave the client a practical way to assess, prioritise, and progress initiatives long after the strategy phase had ended.
Outcome:
Our work helped the client move from strategic ambiguity to a clearer and more confident growth direction. The Board and ELT reached strong alignment on the roadmap, creating a firmer foundation for decision-making and investment.
The life-stage packaged concepts also gave the organisation a distinctive value proposition. Member testing showed stronger resonance for tailored bundles than for generic low-rate offers, giving the client evidence that this was a direction worth pursuing.
Just as importantly, the internal team was equipped to lead the next phase themselves. By embedding the governance model and strategic initiative framework into the organisation, we helped the client build the confidence and capability to carry the work forward independently.
