Featured Case Study
Cobalt Financial Services — the turnaround.
A mid-market financial services firm trapped in manual back-office work rebuilt its operating model around automation — lifting operating margin 23 points in three quarters.
0 pts
Operating margin
over three quarters
-0%
Cost per transaction
within 12 months
9 days → 4 hrs
Statement processing
end-to-end cycle
-31% → 15%
Team attrition
annualized
The engagement
Inside the work.
The same sequence every time — diagnose, design, deliver, prove.
01 — The Challenge
The Challenge
Cobalt's core products were competitive, but 60% of back-office effort ran on spreadsheets, email threads and tribal knowledge. Statement processing took nine days; exceptions were handled ad hoc by senior staff. Attrition in the operations team was running at 31% a year.
Growth was real but unprofitable: every new client added manual load faster than it added margin. The leadership team knew the operating model, not the products, was the constraint — but past 'digital' initiatives had produced decks, not change.
02 — The Strategy
The Strategy
We opened with a six-week discovery: process mining across 42 workflows, an exception analysis of 90 days of transactions, and a full cost-to-serve model per product line. The evidence was unambiguous — 12 workflows produced 78% of the manual effort and 85% of the errors.
The strategy was deliberately narrow: automate the twelve, digitize the exceptions, and rebuild the operating cadence around real-time work queues. No platform gamble. No big-bang. Every step funded by savings it created.
03 — The Execution
The Execution
A 90-day rapid wave deployed RPA across reconciliation, statement exceptions and client onboarding, with a human-in-the-loop exception console. Simultaneously we redesigned the target operating model: 40 roles re-skilled into exception management and client service, supported by a decision tree trained on the senior team's judgment.
Weekly scorecards tracked error rates, cycle time and cost per transaction. When one bot family underperformed, we re-scoped it within a fortnight — the governance cadence caught it before it mattered.
04 — The Results
The Results
Statement processing fell from nine days to four hours. Cost per transaction dropped 62%. The same headcount absorbed 2.4x the volume — growth became profitable again. Operating margin moved 23 points over three quarters, and attrition halved as work became more interesting.
Two years on, the automation estate is governed by an internal COE Cobalt runs entirely on its own.
Timeline
How the work unfolded.
The engagement, phase by phase — funded by the savings it created.
Discovery
Weeks 1–6
Process mining, exception analysis, cost-to-serve model.
Automation wave one
Weeks 7–18
First six workflows automated; exception console live.
Operating model redesign
Months 4–9
Roles re-skilled, cadence rebuilt, scorecards live.
Scale & handover
Months 10–24
COE stood up; estate governed internally.
StrataOPS didn't hand us a slide deck and leave. They rebuilt the way we plan, ship and measure — and our operating margin moved by double digits in three quarters.
Daniel Okafor
CEO, Cobalt Financial Services
Related expertise
Where we apply this.
The capabilities behind this engagement, available across every industry we serve.