We help participants across the payments sector to generate more value from their markets and customers.
The consulting team at The Initiatives Group has advised participants in the payments market since the 1990’s - including issuers, acquirers, third-party processors, technology providers and associations. We help solve many of the financial industry’s most significant issues, such as payments strategies, customer profitability and retention, credit and fraud risk, leveraging new technologies, and assessing new market and product opportunities.
Contact Us
LOCATION
Level 4, 151 Castlereagh St
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
Office hours: 9am - 5pm
CONTACT
+61 418 233 677
Our services
PORTFOLIO PROFITABILITY
Our clients know that managing a portfolio of payment accounts “on the average” is significantly sub-optimal, and that segmentation is key - ideally down to “the segment of one”. Our “Slice & Dice” analytical technique for handling large transactional databases has been proven over many years to identify key profit improvement opportunities - different people have different payment behaviours, which result in different profit outcomes.
LOYALTY
Credit cards and loyalty programmes have become steadily more intertwined since the mid-1990’s, and the team at The Initiatives Group has been heavily involved in many of the prominent Australian loyalty schemes. Our clients have included airlines, merchants, card issuers and programme operators.
NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
New product development could be a new format of credit card or a completely new way to pay or a new country market for your company. The Initiatives Group team brings both insights and experience and has been involved in the successful development and deployment of new product projects across a wide spectrum.
RISK MANAGEMENT
The risks in payments seem to be forever increasing in both variety and complexity, and those intent on fraud, be it cyber or physical in form, continue to grow in the sophistication of their approaches. Indeed, the easier you make it for customers to pay, potentially the easier it is for fraudsters to succeed, so robust mitigation is needed. Similarly, credit providers want to be both faster and more assiduous in their decisioning, which are often conflicting objectives.
PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Speed and efficiency are watchwords of the era, hence improving processes to reduce time and cost has become a key thrust inside Financial Institutions. The Initiatives Group has been involved in bringing “cut-through” and solving challenges in many assignments focussed on these issues
STRATEGY
Bringing multiple workstreams together requires experience in the development of an overall business strategy, be that across all payments streams or just one particular product. The Initiatives Group has developed payments strategies and functionality roadmaps for banks and for merchants, and has undertaken numerous market entry / market assessments across Asia-Pacific.
DATA & AI
TIG’s Data and AI Advisory practice helps organisations unlock new revenue, reduce enterprise risk, and lower operating costs. We support executives in leveraging enterprise data assets and artificial intelligence to make better commercial decisions, deliver measurable business outcomes, and build a sustainable competitive edge through five core service offerings.
1. Drive AI-mediated sales growth
Australians are increasingly using AI platforms to discover and buy products. AI platforms are replacing traditional keyword search as the dominant channel for high-intent product discovery. Businesses omitted from this channel face immediate, unmeasured market share erosion. Our Data & AI Advisory service helps clients secure their market share in this new channel by optimising AI-mediated sales conversions and minimising marketing wastage.
2. Maximise Customer Lifetime Value
Sustainable profit growth relies on maximising customer lifetime value through targeted, personalised interventions. This requires prioritising actions that optimise customer response and bottom-line impact across the entire customer lifecycle. Our Data & AI Advisory service helps organisations through targeted predictive interventions and next-best-action strategies.
3. Minimise Fraud and Scam Risk
ASIC's Scam Prevention Framework will impose enforceable scam-risk standards from 31 March 2027, with penalties up to $50 million or 30% of turnover. This necessitates a shift from static, rules-based monitoring to AI-driven behavioural analytics, real-time anomaly detection, and predictive identification of both fraudulent transactions and vulnerable customers. Our Data & AI Advisory service helps organisations prevent financial loss by intercepting compromised interactions in real time, and proactively protecting vulnerable accounts.
4. Minimise Operational Expense
Driving operational efficiency requires re-engineering complex, high-cognitive-load workflows across application intake, back-office servicing, compliance verification, and customer operations. As Agentic AI matures, enterprises must deploy resilient automation architectures that mitigate model hallucination risks while scaling execution speed. Our Data & AI Advisory service helps enterprises achieve this by automating high-cognitive-load operations, deploying a secure agentic data layer to accelerate decisions, and providing continuous visibility into OpEx savings.
5. Gain institutional trust in AI usage
AI capabilities are scaling faster than traditional enterprise risk and governance frameworks. Deploying autonomous models without appropriate control measures introduces severe regulatory exposure, reputational damage, and financial liability. Our Data & AI Advisory service helps executives safely scale autonomous systems by implementing robust governance architectures and delivering direct line-of-sight into residual risks.
Let's talk
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