CASE STUDY

The Situation

A New York-based payments platform processing over $8 billion in annual transaction volume had appointed a new CEO twelve months prior following a founder transition. The incoming CEO had a strong operator background and had taken two businesses through successful IPOs previously. Within his first six months he had formed a clear view that the organisational structure inherited from the founder era, while effective at driving growth, had several critical vulnerabilities that would be exposed under public market conditions. Reporting lines across technology, risk, and compliance had evolved organically rather than by design. Compensation structures had not been benchmarked against the market since a Radford survey conducted two years earlier. And succession planning for four of the eight direct reports was either underdeveloped or entirely absent. The CEO engaged Valmont to conduct a comprehensive talent advisory review across all three areas before the business formally initiated its IPO preparation process.

The Challenge

The advisory engagement needed to address three distinct but interconnected problems. On organisational design, the question was whether the current structure was built to support a public company operating environment, or whether it reflected the informal decision-making patterns of a founder-led business that had scaled faster than its governance frameworks. On compensation, the business had lost two senior technology leaders in the prior twelve months partly due to below-market packages that had not been identified as a retention risk until the resignations came. The CEO needed an accurate, current picture of what the market was paying across every senior function before the IPO process began competing for attention and making compensation reviews difficult to execute. On succession, the board's nomination committee had already flagged the absence of documented succession plans as a governance gap that would need to be addressed in the IPO prospectus. The CEO needed credible plans in place, not placeholder documents.

The Approach

Valmont structured the engagement across three sequential workstreams delivered over an eight week period, with a consolidated findings presentation to the CEO and board at the conclusion.
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The organisational design workstream began with individual structured interviews with all eight direct reports and twelve of their direct reports, conducted by Valmont's advisory lead. The objective was to build an accurate picture of how decisions were actually being made, where accountability was genuinely clear and where it was ambiguous, and which structural changes would have the highest impact on governance quality and operational performance without disrupting the commercial momentum the business had built. Valmont benchmarked the findings against the organisational structures of five comparable payments businesses that had successfully completed US IPOs in the prior four years.

The compensation benchmarking workstream drew on Valmont's live search data from placements completed in the prior ninety days across payments, FinTech, and financial services, supplemented by direct market intelligence from confidential conversations with candidates and hiring managers across the sector. Every role at Director level and above was benchmarked across base salary, target bonus, long-term incentive design, and equity structure. The output was a role-by-role analysis identifying where the business was at market, where it was below market and at retention risk, and where it was above market and carrying unnecessary cost.

The succession planning workstream assessed internal succession readiness for each of the eight direct report roles using a structured framework covering performance trajectory, leadership capability, role complexity readiness, and development timeline. For roles where internal succession was not credible within a twelve to eighteen month horizon, Valmont provided an external talent market assessment identifying the depth of the available candidate pool and a realistic timeline for an external search if required.

The Outcome

The consolidated findings presentation to the CEO and board identified seven structural changes to the organisational design that were subsequently implemented over a ninety day period, including the creation of a Chief of Staff role reporting directly to the CEO to manage cross-functional governance, and the separation of the technology and data functions into two distinct reporting lines to reflect the growing strategic importance of the data platform.
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The compensation review identified six roles where packages were materially below market, three of which were assessed as high flight risk. All six were adjusted before the IPO preparation process began. In the twelve months following the review there were no senior departures attributable to compensation.
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Credible succession plans were documented for all eight direct report roles. Three were assessed as having strong internal successors within twelve months. Three had identified internal candidates requiring structured development over eighteen to twenty-four months. Two required external succession plans given the absence of credible internal candidates, and Valmont provided talent maps for both within the scope of the engagement.
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The board's nomination committee subsequently noted the succession planning documentation as one of the governance improvements that materially strengthened the IPO readiness assessment conducted by the firm's investment banking advisors.