CASE STUDY · STRATEGY · ANONYMIZED · ADVISORY
DAM architecture and vendor selection for a Swiss bank.
Vendor evaluation
Delivered
Advisory path
Audit
Requirements
Framework
Evaluation
Recommendation
Scoring framework
Functional capability
Integration fit
Total cost of ownership
Vendor stability
Implementation risk
Neutral
Requirements-led
Accepted
Client
Anonymized — Swiss bank
Industry
Financial services
Service area
Strategy (Advisory audits)
Engagement type
Project (focused advisory)
Status
Delivered, recommendation accepted
01 — The brief
A Swiss bank with marketing assets distributed across multiple internal teams, multiple regions, and multiple production agencies. The Digital Asset Management situation had grown organically across years — each team using its own tools, each agency delivering files in its own way, no consistent taxonomy, and no governance over which assets were current versus deprecated.
The ask wasn’t for an agency to build the new DAM. It was for an outside voice to do the architecture audit, define the actual requirements, evaluate the vendor landscape against those requirements, and write a recommendation the in-house team could take to leadership for approval and budget allocation.
The key constraint: the advisory had to be commercially neutral. We had no implementation revenue tied to the recommendation, which is exactly why the bank wanted us in the role.
02 — What we did
01
Architecture audit
Mapped the current state — every team using assets, every tool currently storing them, every agency delivering them, every workflow that depended on the current setup. Identified the friction points, the duplication, the governance gaps, and the costs (visible and hidden) of the existing arrangement.
02
Requirements definition
The hard work most DAM evaluations skip. Worked through what the bank actually needed the system to do — not a generic feature checklist, but the specific workflows, integration points, governance requirements, and scale considerations the bank’s situation demanded. Including the requirements that don’t fit on a vendor RFP because they’re about how the org actually works, not about what software does.
03
Vendor evaluation framework
Built a scoring framework across functional capability, integration fit, total cost of ownership, vendor stability, and implementation risk. The framework was designed for the bank’s specific decision criteria, not lifted from a Forrester report.
04
Vendor evaluation
Scored the relevant vendors in the DAM market against the framework. Demos arranged, references checked, security and compliance review aligned to the bank’s requirements (which in financial services are non-trivial).
05
Recommendation
Written recommendation to leadership covering the recommended vendor, the rationale, the implementation risks to manage, the change-management considerations, and the realistic budget and timeline. The kind of document a CFO can sign off on and a CMO can defend in a board meeting.
03 — How the engagement runs
Fixed-price project. Six-week engagement covering audit, requirements, framework, evaluation, and recommendation. Pure advisory — we did not implement the chosen DAM, and we had no commercial relationship with any of the vendors evaluated. Execution sat with the bank’s internal team and their chosen implementation partner.
04 — What changed
“
The recommendation was accepted by leadership. The procurement and implementation work that followed had a documented foundation underneath it — the requirements, the rationale, the trade-offs accepted at the recommendation stage — which made the implementation conversations significantly faster.
The more durable change: a precedent for how the bank evaluates marketing technology decisions. The same framework, adapted, has been used for subsequent vendor evaluations on adjacent stack decisions.
The engagement also shows the value of advisory work without execution attached. Most agencies can’t credibly do this kind of evaluation because they have a financial incentive to recommend whatever they implement most. The lack of that incentive is the product.