Project Helix (complete Billing Systems transformation)
Objectives:
Having amassed an account portfolio in excess of 40 million customers while growing rapidly over the previous decade, Capital One’s legacy IT systems were being pushed to the limit and made account customization, cross-selling, and product innovation extremely onerous tasks. Previous attempts to provide a fix had fallen short; the executive team believed now was the time to build a system that would allow for continued growth and support the company’s strategy to expand into retail banking. Rob Alexander, previously head of Capital One’s Credit Card division, was asked to lead the aptly named Project Helix (customer intelligence and analysis was considered the DNA of the company).
Our Role:
We partnered with Rob and his HR People Team to build initial leadership team clarity and alignment on the overall project objectives and timeline. “A major IT consulting firm assessed the project and gave us a 1% chance of meeting our target delivery date. I knew this would require extraordinary levels of commitment on behalf of everyone involved,” Alexander said. “To begin to gain their commitment, I knew we had to build a vivid and compelling vision of the future system capabilities. We settled on a simple, but enormously energizing phrase: ‘Building the Infrastructure to Power Innovation.’ This became a galvanizing theme for everything we did.” We supported Rob and the leadership team on an ongoing basis to monitor alignment, engagement and conviction around the ability of the entire 2,000-person delivery team to succeed. We supported the People Team in establishing practices designed to address escalation routines, inter-departmental partnership and collaboration, and overall associate engagement.
Outcomes:
Upon completion of the 3-year project–within budget and ahead of the original schedule–the system went live and the benefits began to roll in. Introducing new credit card services takes weeks, not six months. Charge-offs take a week rather than a year. Errors have been reduced dramatically, while system maintenance costs have fallen significantly. Rob Alexander is now Chief Technology Officer at the company and we continue to support him and his current leadership team in advancing their Technology Transformation agenda.
Note: Under Alexander’s leadership, Capital One is known as a leader in the pursuit of innovative technology adoption and has recently acquired the Discover portfolio and payments infrastructure.