The commercial technology layer in a financial services business at £20m to £250m revenue is the cost base I find most consistently under-examined relative to what it is actually producing.
Not the core banking infrastructure. The commercial layer sitting above it. The CRM selected when the customer base was a tenth of its current size, now running at a cost that was never revised against the commercial outcomes it was producing at scale. The marketing automation platform extended repeatedly beyond the use case it was purchased for. The data warehouse that costs more each year and produces less usable commercial intelligence than it did two years ago because the team that built it has moved on.
Each of those was a defensible purchasing decision in its own moment. Together they represent a cost base that is significantly underperforming its investment case and has not been reviewed because reviewing it would require someone to own the finding and act on it. That review is a CFO responsibility. I have not yet found a financial services business where it was being done.
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