Common-sense philosophy can go a long way. That much is evident from the extraordinary procurement transformation of Vanquis Bank.

Established in 1880, Vanquis Banking Group is a leading UK financial institution with around 1.75 million customers, according to the London Stock Exchange. 

A specialist bank that lends to people with lower financial resilience, Vanquis Bank champions unrepresented markets and creates vital paths for financial accessibility, transforming the lives of millions seeking peace of mind, stability and financial comfort.

As an institution Vanquis has transformed a lot too, navigating financial downturn and unpredictability to emerge stronger than ever. Much of this is owed to the robust and collaborative nature of its procurement, which has radically evolved over the past decade. The architect of this transformation is Steven Schools, Vanquis Banking Group’s Head of Procurement & Supplier Governance and proponent of procurement common sense.

Steven’s pathway to procurement at Vanquis Bank 

“My philosophy for procurement is to be as pragmatic and to use as much common sense as possible,” Steven explains. “Procurement should be a value-adding service within the business, supporting its overarching goals.”

Steven is no stranger to adding value. His long-term strategic approach to procurement, holistic mindset and personable nature have made him an indispensable asset since he joined the Group as Procurement Manager in 2009. 

Growing up in London, Steven initially pursued a career in science, studying Chemistry and Geology at Leeds University. But he came away wanting something less clinical, more collaborative. “I quickly learned that I didn't like life in a lab and I sought something a bit more face-to-face,” he laughs. “Well, it's more like teams to teams now, isn't it? But still, I wanted that in-person interaction.”

After that, Steven became MCIPS qualified and pursued a career in procurement. Today, he credits his success to his pragmatism and relationship management skills. “I get on with a lot of people of different ilks and ages and backgrounds,” he says. “I find that this has kept me in good stead with managing stakeholders and handling supplier negotiations.”

Vanquis was Steven's first venture into the financial industry, happening in his own words, by fluke. “My last role was ten  years in the car hire industry, which unfortunately went into administration in 2009 after the banking crisis,” he explains. “So, I applied for a lot of different roles in procurement. And luckily enough, Vanquis Banking Group picked me up and I've succeeded ever since.”

Proving procurement’s value and pushing for change

Steven began by working in the Consumer Credit Division of the Group, in the renowned doorstep lending division known as Provident or the provi. There he opened the door to a procurement department that felt left behind. 

“When I joined in 2009, the Procurement Department had only just been newly created in 2007,” he explains.

“We didn't have a full coverage of all the different departments within that division. So, my first goal was to get the departments refusing to use procurement on our side and show what value that procurement could add. I got a lot of support for this, helping stakeholders renegotiate their prices and holding suppliers accountable for  their SLAs.”

Steven finds fulfilment in negotiating, whether  the stakes are £1000 or £10 million.

“What I really like is trying to stretch what I think I can achieve, seeing whether I can beat my own target,” he explains. “It’s the to and fro-ing of the negotiation and the success in finding a happy path, a happy medium.” He’s a procurement professional with a knack for finding the happy medium it seems, bringing siloed departments together and fostering newfound collaboration across Vanquis Bank.

When Steven was promoted to Senior Procurement Manager in 2012 he was given two more departments to manage which needed transforming as well. “I found that there were a lot of efficiencies that I could add to put my stamp on those departments.” He also saw an opportunity to become Head of Procurement for that division when the previous head moved to another department in 2014. 

In 2015, Steven fulfilled this ambition, working to redevelop procurement procedures and processes to enhance business value. One area he focused on was reducing the amount of siloed divisions and departments. “Because the business had five siloed divisions, we had three procurement departments,” He explains. “They ran independently for three separate consumer credit businesses.”

To tackle this plethora of siloed departments Steven forged a three-year plan, brought it to the board, and promised to  deliver if given the role of Group Head of Procurement.

The board agreed and in 2020 Steven started his plan, unifying and standardising the processes and procedures of the different procurement departments. He brought them together into one singular department, bringing major efficiency and cost savings. By 2023 all third-party spend was under one roof and Steven has been promoted once more: to Vanquis Banking Group’s Head of Procurement and Supplier Governance.

Procurement’s role in large-scale transformation

Procurement has played a critical role in the large-scale transformation of Vanquis Banking Group, as its five siloed businesses were united in both strategy and organisation under one roof.

“We were doing a full group-wide transformation,” Steven explains. “The core one was the IT stack that we were going to put all of our products on. But we were also transforming the procurement department, the HR department, the risk department, compliance and audit etc.” 

All these individual departments had their own smaller transformation plans, which were dependent on procurement for ensuring supplier access and the correct choice of implementation partners. Procurement played a critical role in removing bottlenecks, by ensuring deliverables weren’t counterproductive and responsibility was spread out across departments. 

“This was a monumental undertaking,” Steven adds. “ It started at the board and had to go all the way down to all of the infrastructure.”

Some of this infrastructure needed serious rehauling. The Group had three legacy IT infrastructures determined not to be viable, so Steven and his team had to support the integration of a brand new cloud-based IT stack into the procurement strategy and the migration of products onto the new IT stack.

“We've been supporting the IT teams and the development teams so they’ll be able to purchase the other smaller products needed to glue all of these big products together,” Steven says. “It was critical they were able to do this in a reasonably fast and agile fashion so that we don't slow the delivery of the overall project.”

To achieve this procurement had to be engaged from day one, ready to go with products contracted and systems set up to begin configuration and implementation processes.

“We worked with the different teams around the businesses to be able to partner up the right suppliers to be able to help them do their transformation plan as much as we helped ourselves to do our own.” Steven adds. 

The finance team was also transforming during this time. Procurement needed to coordinate with them to balance supplier delivery and internal time because both teams had systems being delivered in parallel. “So they were looking to unify their general ledger and we were looking to bring out a single P2P system,” Steven explains. “We ran these two projects in parallel because there was an awful lot of crossover, they were directly linked as purchasing orders are connected to the general ledger and determine if invoices get paid.”

Prior to delivering these systems, sending a spend report across the Vanquis Bank Group would take someone in the procurement team up to three weeks to collect and merge the data. After the delivery a report could be processed and delivered in minutes, giving the procurement team a live view of daily, weekly and monthly spend activity.

“This enabled us to create much more targeted category plans and grow more flexible in the way we do things,” Steven explains. “So, for example, we've created a policy that empowers the category managers and the sources in my team to work out what's the best way to market so they can do as light a touch as possible or the full flavour of a tender as long as it's appropriate for what we're trying to achieve.”

Ultimately this has enhanced the flexibility of procurement at Vanquis Banking Group, enabling the team to build long-term plans and strategies centred around financial data reporting.

Balancing regulations and business objectives

Banks and regulation are like cars and handbrakes: partnered together for a reason. 

Financial institutions like Vanquis are duty-bound to comply with the regulations laid out by regulatory bodies such as the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Procurement plays a critical role in ensuring this compliance, and Steven has always met that responsibility pragmatically.

“Firstly, we try to address this in our procurement policy to say, look, here's our minimum requirement,” Steven says. “We need to ensure that we do this as a minimum because you can't flex what the regulations say. We need to then layer that with a risk appetite to establish what we’re comfortable with. Then we need to put that into process so when people want to procure something we ensure we’re leading with that policy.”

Then Steven ensures they have regular oversight and internal reviews to ensure compliance with these regulations. If Vanquis Bank wants to expand beyond the boundaries of risk appetite Steven has built up procurement to be prepared to respond, balancing its responsibilities with agility. They’ll highlight the risks in a detailed paper to the business or the board, so they can make an informed decision. 

“I’ve built the department to be as agile as possible while still being able to be compliant with the regulations,” Steven says. “It’s essential we can do this and meet the business needs surrounding speed to agility, speed to market and onboarding.” This plays into supplier onboarding, where Steven has helped procurement navigate the tension between speedy decisiveness and correct selection.

“It’s almost an oxymoron in itself because we must find the balance between the business accepting that it's not as fast as they want, but procurement accepts it's as fast as we can physically go without compromising our basic principles with the regulators.”

He finishes by saying procurement must confirm that: “We've got the right governance in place, that we've got the right contract in place, got the right commercials in place, and it's the right partner for the future.”

Procurement’s role in navigating financial turbulence 

The transformation of procurement has been essential to the Group’s ability to navigate financial turbulence. “2023 was a very tough year for us,” Steven explains. “We were in the middle of this large-scale transformation project, so we were paying for all the legacy IT systems and non-IT systems, but also paying for all the new systems that we'd contracted so that we could move into the new world.”

As the foundation needed to migrate Vanquis’s products to the new systems being built, the bank was running at dual costs. Steven says this and the subsequent impact on cost efficiency was a necessary evil, to reach their targeted state. A state which the procurement department, unified and transformed by his three-year plan, was ready immediately to start working towards.

“With the implementation of a no PO- no pay system, we'd eliminate all rogue spend,” Steven says. “We had full visibility of all the suppliers across our group and were able to onboard suppliers faster rather than waiting ages for all the data.”

This increased visibility then enabled category members to effectively confront the problem of dual running costs by optimising what was in the supplier base. “We were able to support the business in its goals to reduce third-party spend,” Steven adds.

“And we had a new CFO that joined who had a more ambitious plan for rationalising the supply base and empowered procurement to go out and do this. We then created a much more targeted strategy on reducing suppliers.”

Because Steven had built up preparedness in the procurement team by standardising processes, integrating teams and migrating to more efficient platforms they were also able to further reduce organisational costs. 

“We went out to the business and managed to get a huge lowering of the supply base costs and a huge reduction in the number of supply numbers,” he explains. 

“We wouldn't have been as fast to react and as agile as the business needed us to be. Therefore, yes we would have delivered, but we wouldn't have delivered as much in the time that we had.”

Zoot: an integral partnership 

Steven credits his biggest inspiration as his father, who worked as a London black cab driver. “ He taught me the value of having a work-life balance because he was self-employed and worked whenever he wanted,” he explains.

“He just basically enjoyed life when not at work. His advice was to enjoy life today, as you'll never know what's around the corner. These are the words I try to live by.”

Wise words with a lot of truth in them. While the transformation of Vanquis Bank has been gradual and strategic, we all experience rapid and unexpected forms of change in our lives. Nothing is ever fully guaranteed, which is why it's critical to live authentic lives filled with honest people and valuable relationships, a philosophy that applies to the working world too.

Vanquis started its partnership with Zoot in 2020 after cracks showed in its current partner's ability to deliver a large product critical to the running of a major division. “The repercussions of that failure would mean that the whole division would come to a grinding halt,” Steven explains. 

“We’d also be in breach of regulations, so we couldn't afford to do that.”

A leading software company with powerful data orchestration capabilities, Steven praises Zoot for not only their competency in delivering the product but also their integrity as an organisation. 

“Zoot honoured previous discussions and prices,” he explains. “ They assigned resources almost immediately when they could have easily inflated their bottom line and exploited the situation, but they didn't. This strategic decision by them has paid off because after five years they've almost tripled their revenue stream with us.”

Zoot was the ideal partner to accompany Vanquis on its strategic, large-scale plan, influencing the organisation's approach to partnerships ever since. “Part of the process was to try and tease out whether the partners that we were thinking of selecting would act and behave in a way that was similar to the way that Zoot treated us when we really needed them in 2020,” Steven adds.

The future of Vanquis Bank

Vanquis Bank is now in the final eighteen or so months of its transformation plan, with a positive outlook for the future.

They recently acquired a new company called Snoop, a consumer app for money management, which Steven anticipates will constitute a major USP for them in the marketplace. The bank has  the core deliverables and  delivery plan for migration onto the new IT stack ready and anticipates significant results. 

“Once these things migrate over, we'll start to see huge, huge benefits not from just a customer-centric point of view, but from a commercial point of view and a supplier numbers point of view and a third-party spend point of view,” Steven says. 

“It's going to be able to make our bank far more agile and able to react to the market to potentially expand our product set.” The procurement department will continue to support Vanquis Bank through this, securing vital purchases to continue their transformation roadmap and work on critical projects.

“The main one for us, I think for my team, will be working with the decommissioning project,” Steven says. “We now have to work out the balance between when we can switch off the legacy IT system because we don't need it anymore versus when that contract renewal will be needed.”

This process is more complicated than it may initially seem. It requires the procurement team to balance the needs of Vanquis’s many different systems and suppliers with minimising cost wastage. Balancing this- and achieving Vanquis’s broader business goals- will be significantly more efficient and easier to accomplish thanks to Steven’s transformation of the procurement department. 

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