Client Background
The client is a UAE-based Islamic finance company licensed by the central bank, offering Shariah-compliant financing to retail, SME and corporate customers and building a growing ecosystem of fintech partnerships. Heightened regional uncertainty, shifting market dynamics and regulatory developments prompted management to revalidate and refresh its business plan for the year ahead. Existing priorities, initiatives and KPIs had been set in isolation and needed to be brought together into a single strategy-to-execution framework. Cedar was engaged to validate the strategic priorities, align the leadership team on key focus areas and design a board-level strategy reporting framework using the Balanced Scorecard.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied its Balanced Scorecard methodology through a four-part programme: market and internal assessment, leadership discussions, a leadership alignment workshop, and KPI and initiative finalisation leading to a board reporting framework and roadmap.
Assessment and Leadership Conversations – Cedar reviewed the UAE macroeconomic and banking landscape, lessons from past periods of regional disruption, sector impacts, financing outlook and short-term liquidity deployment options, together with the company's financial trends. Discussions with leaders across the chief executive's office, business, finance, cards, fintech, business development, credit, IT and operations surfaced ambitions for financing, deposit and fintech-led growth, and constraints ranging from manual onboarding and approvals to gaps in product management, relationship coverage and IT architecture.
Balanced Scorecard Workshop – In a working session of more than six hours, 23 members of the leadership team worked in four groups, guided by Cedar's perspective-by-perspective method for defining financial, customer, internal process and learning and growth objectives. The workshop drafted 20 strategic objectives across the four perspectives and assembled them into a strategy map linking financing growth and fintech partnerships to customer promises, process excellence and people and technology enablers.
Measures and Initiatives – For each objective Cedar proposed lead and lag measures with units and reporting frequencies, and the leadership identified 27 initiatives, including digital onboarding and instant credit decisioning, an SME online platform, early warning and collections, open finance, AI-driven analytics, customer experience surveys and structured talent programmes.
Enterprise Scorecard – The objectives, measures and initiatives were consolidated into a draft enterprise scorecard with objective owners, monthly and year-to-date tracking against targets, providing the basis for board-level strategy reporting.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The workshop gave the leadership team a shared, documented view of strategy, with a single strategy map and draft enterprise scorecard replacing disconnected priorities. Key themes include profitable growth of the financing book, scaling fintech partnerships, optimising liquidity costs, improving risk-adjusted returns, faster partner onboarding, AI-enabled early alerts on non-performing accounts and stronger MIS and data-driven decisioning.
The agreed next steps are to prioritise the initiative longlist, assign owners for each objective and initiative, set targets for the finalised measures, and activate a monthly performance review against the scorecard.