By Niamh Kingsley, Founder & CEO of ace
After a decade of working across financial services and technology, I've watched more firms than I'd care to count chasing "digital transformation" like it's the finish line.
It's not.
Being digital is now table stakes, the baseline for survival, not a competitive advantage.
The kicker? According to Gartner, only 48% of digital transformation initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets, despite organisations collectively spending $2.5 trillion on said transformations. That means around $1.25 trillion (the same GDP as the Netherlands) is regularly being wasted on initiatives that fail. That’s a lot of money. And we’re not learning from our mistakes ... we’re repeating them en masse.
Now financial services organisations move cautiously for good reason. Regulation, risk frameworks and legacy infrastructure demand it. But an abundance of caution shouldn't mean stagnation.
Whilst firms tiptoe around incremental change, quantum computing threatens cryptographic security, institutional distributed ledger technology (DLT) redefines settlement, and ethical artificial intelligence (AI) shifts from an aspiration to an regulatory requirement. I fundamentally believe the companies that successfully navigate this complexity will define the next decade.
That's the post-digital opportunity. And that's why I'm launching ace.
The consulting market is saturated with generalists pushing reactive solutions. A client comes in asking for "an AI strategy", and too many firms will happily jump at the chance to sell them exactly that - without stopping to ask what business problem they're actually trying to solve.
I've lived this frustration firsthand. Firms slap "AI" onto everything for the sake of optics, creating isolated technology strategies that don't integrate with the broader goals of the business. Half these projects fail because leadership gets sold on buzzwords, whilst operational teams struggle with tech debt and fragmented systems that don't talk to each other.
Meanwhile, next-gen technologies (quantum computing, institutional DLT, autonomous systems, robotics) are dismissed as "science fiction" as senior leaders who'll be absolutely blindsided when these innovations fundamentally reshape their markets.
I can't stress this enough. The industry doesn't need more tactical AI implementations. It needs strategic thinking about how post-digital technologies create genuine competitive differentiation over the next ten years and beyond.
ace exists to bridge the gap between digital potential and post-digital performance.
We're not a start-up: we're a scale up, launching as part of the G MASS business within the Good Together Group. That means we have the right infrastructure from day one, as well as established client relationships, a proven delivery model, and the operational backbone to move fast.
Our offering spans five core areas:
Crucially, we challenge the brief before accepting it.
If a client asks for AI use cases, we ask what they want to achieve. If the answer is operational efficiency in reconciliations, we might recommend process optimisation and enhanced data due diligence before introducing AI ... because strategy matters more than tactics.
We're at an inflection point. Post-digital technologies are moving from experimental to essential. Firms that embed these capabilities strategically will win. Those that don't will spend the 2030s playing catch-up.
ace is purpose-built for this moment, combining deep technical expertise, strategic rigour, and a proprietary framework that helps clients think holistically about DLT, robotics, extended reality, AI, mutualisation, and advanced computing.
If you're a tired of consultants selling you solutions to problems you don't have, let's talk.
The post-digital era demands more than transformation. It demands reinvention.
And that's exactly what ace delivers.
