Challenge

LBG's board faced a critical buy vs build decision in relation to its strategic response to the emerging Open Banking landscape. With a potential £10m investment on the table, the strategic choice required understanding long-term market implications and technology risks — but the organisation was limited to 12-18 month planning horizons while the board needed 10-year strategic context to make it with confidence.

Approach

The initial brief was to define a set of Open Banking features that would be desirable in five years time. Working with senior stakeholders, we quickly established that the real question was strategic rather than product-level — and restructured the engagement around futures methodology.

Using structured horizon scanning, we mapped possible, preferable, and potential futures for the market — three distinct lenses that together reveal not just what might happen, but what the organisation should want to happen and what it needs to be ready for. From these futures we designed a set of speculative future services, each grounded in LBG's strategic strengths and the competitive landscape as it was evolving.

Back-casting from those futures against the current technology roadmap exposed the critical gaps — and made the recommendation clear: buy, don't build.

Outcome

A £10m investment decision de-risked in six weeks. The engagement delivered:

• Board-level strategic clarity across a 10-year horizon, in an organisation operating on 18-month planning cycles

• A clear and evidenced buy vs build recommendation, directly informing a major capital investment decision

• Demonstrated that futures methodology applied at board level can change the quality of the most consequential decisions an organisation makes

• A replicable approach to strategic foresight that the organisation could apply to future investment decisions