Middle East Bank: Running Primary Research Across Five Work Streams
Led stakeholder interviews across five banking segments to identify cost reduction and operations transformation opportunities for a top-five Middle Eastern bank
Yajur Mahajan
Live Project Head at Bambrew
From their time as
Investment Analyst
Warmup Ventures • 2024 - 2025
Overview
Yajur joined a large-scale operations transformation engagement at Deloitte Consulting for a top-five Middle Eastern bank. The overall initiative was aimed at reducing the bank's cost base significantly. His work stream was responsible for identifying cost reduction opportunities across four geographies, covering five segments: investment operations, wealth management, account services, credit operations, and cards.
The Story
Yajur joined a large-scale operations transformation engagement at Deloitte Consulting for a top-five Middle Eastern bank. The overall initiative was aimed at reducing the bank's cost base significantly. His work stream was responsible for identifying cost reduction opportunities across four geographies, covering five segments: investment operations, wealth management, account services, credit operations, and cards.
His primary task was to run stakeholder interviews individually across these five segments. The stakeholders ranged from manager-level professionals to SVPs and VPs, each providing ground-level insight into how the bank's operations actually functioned versus how they were designed to function.
From these interviews, Yajur synthesized findings into three categories. The first was technology-based opportunities: areas where AI integration, automation, or API connectivity between siloed systems could reduce manual effort. A specific example was identifying processes where human intervention was required solely to transfer data between two disconnected systems, which could be replaced by an API or workflow tool.
The second category was process-based interventions: tasks that did not require specialist expertise and could be moved to shared services, or processes that could be restructured for greater efficiency. The third was people-based opportunities: mismatches between full-time employee allocation and actual task utilization, which pointed to headroom in the bank's employee cost base.
Yajur developed the interventions for each finding, benchmarked them against how comparable banks operated across the Middle East, India, and globally, and obtained sign-offs from relevant teams including risk. He then presented the consolidated findings to the bank's steering committee and management committee, framing the output not just as a list of interventions but as a structured cost reduction roadmap with projected savings over a multi-year horizon.