3
Mapped with what each allows the client to offer, and how quickly.
Case study · Consulting · Fintech strategy
Before you pick a fintech partner, know what you are allowed to build.
A mobile and fibre operator in the Gulf wanted to add a digital wallet, cards, remittance and micro-loans to its bundle. Before choosing a partner it needed a strategy: which licensing route, which products first, which providers were even eligible, and what they would really cost. We prepared all of it, with the customer's experience of the wallet as the yardstick — so the selection that followed was a decision rather than a negotiation.
The idea
A decision, not a negotiation.Ground rules, long list, criteria and the numbers — all prepared before the first vendor meeting could score itself.
10
Scanned and classified before anyone was scored.
5
Agreed by the steering committee before the first assessment.
6years
A financial model including the pass-through costs proposals leave out.
The brief
The temptation is to start taking vendor meetings.
Operators across the Gulf are adding financial services to their offer, and the client's commercial leadership wanted a wallet of its own, launched through a partner rather than built in-house. The risk in that situation: a platform demonstration the company cannot legally operate, a proposal whose real costs appear after signature, and a decision made on whoever presented best. We were asked to prepare the strategy first — the ground rules, the long list, the evaluation framework and the numbers — with a fortnightly steering committee chaired by the chief commercial officer deciding every two weeks.
The ground rules
regulation first, products secondThree ways to operate a wallet. Only then, the wish list.
The first piece of work was regulatory: a wallet in this market can be operated three ways, each with different obligations, contract durations and dependencies — and each compatible with a different set of providers. That map became the first filter for everything that followed.
Wallet-as-a-service
A wallet licence held through a sponsoring bank.
Full banking licence
Operated through a bank partner, with everything that allows and requires.
Agent banking
An agent-banking arrangement, with its own dependencies and duration.
Then the product scope. The wish list was long — wallet, cards, remittance for a large expatriate base, micro-loans, buy-now-pay-later, insurance, and a roadmap beyond it. We separated the first release from the roadmap and wrote a marketing service description for the wallet — defined from the customer's side, the journeys and outcomes a subscriber would actually experience — so every provider responded to the same product definition rather than proposing its own. One finding shaped the scope early: every provider said micro-loans would need a separate, licensed lending partner — so lending became a parallel track with its own search, not an assumption buried inside wallet proposals.
The long list, disciplined
Classified before compared. Criteria before scores.
Ten providers, two axes
Licensed local wallet operators, regional platforms with a track record in the client's market, buy-now-pay-later specialists, and global code-for-fee stacks. Before anyone was scored, each was classified: licensed to operate locally or platform-only, and which first-release products it covered end to end. A written questionnaire went to each — products, licence ownership, delivery model, live volumes, time to a minimum viable product. Several strong platforms turned out to have no local licence and to be looking for an operational partner themselves — a different conversation from the one the client wanted to have.
Five criteria, signed off first
- Coverage of the first-release product set
- Time to market
- Licensing model
- Cost — split into capital and operating, and by structure
- Commercial model: banking-as-a-service, revenue share or platform fee
Every provider was scored on the same grid. The grid, not the meetings, produced the shortlist of four.
The numbers
like compared with likeThe model is what made the hardest call easy.
Fintech proposals rarely include the third-party pass-through costs that decide whether a wallet makes money: sponsor-bank and card-scheme fees, government identity and address verification, credit-bureau checks, cash-in fees, payment-gateway processing, the lending partner. We built a six-year model that estimated each from the most complete proposal received and applied them to every finalist, with the client's own costs shown separately.
A negotiation, stopped by arithmetic
One partnership had been under negotiation for weeks on a revenue-share basis. In the model, every variant broke even in year five or six at best. That went to the committee with the numbers, and the negotiation was stopped — no drama, no personalities, just the model.
And reopened on its merits
The same provider later returned with a different structure — its platform in exchange for the client's telecom services at zero fees — which the model could assess on its merits. That is what an evaluation framework is for: any offer, any structure, one grid.
The preparation closed with a single plan from proposals to launch readiness — technical assessment, commercial negotiation, selection, agreement review by the client's strategy adviser, the regulator's no-objection application — sequenced from first proposal to filing in about four months.
What the client gets
A licensing map
What it can operate, under which route, and with whom.
One product definition
A first release every provider responds to, with the roadmap kept separate.
A classified long list
Platform-only vendors and licensed operators compared with their peers.
Criteria the committee owns
Agreed before the first score, applied to every provider alike.
An honest model
The costs proposals leave out, included — and break-even shown honestly.
A timeline with governance
From proposals to regulator filing, with a decision every two weeks — and a partner who can run the wallet's customer care from day one.
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Adding financial services to your bundle?
We prepare fintech strategy for operators and service businesses in GCC, from licensing routes to the financial model. And once the wallet launches, we can run the customer care behind it.