NextWave investment: YFM backs consultancy with £3m

Financial services firms are under pressure to move faster on AI and digital transformation. The harder challenge is finding partners who can deliver.

The financial services sector has been investing heavily in digital transformation for years. The direction is clear, AI-enabled processes, automated workflows, modern data infrastructure and increasing regulatory complexity. But the gap between strategic intent and tangible results remains wide. Long timelines, large delivery teams and ROI deferred to the end of multi-year programmes have made many institutions cautious, even when the urgency to move is real.

NextWave was built to address that problem directly.

Founded by Tony Clark, NextWave is a next-gen consultancy working with Tier 1 global financial services firms across banking, asset management, insurance and fintech. The business has completed over 100 projects for 22 global financial services clients and has been recognised as one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work.

YFM are pleased to have invested £3.0m from our VCT managed funds, British Smaller Companies VCT and British Smaller Companies VCT2, to support the next phase of growth for a team that has built a genuinely differentiated position in a market where specialist capability is increasingly in demand.

Enterprise financial services budgets are shifting decisively towards AI deployment, automation and data infrastructure. But only around 7% of financial services firms have fully scaled AI enterprise-wide, and around 80% report no material bottom-line impact yet, not because the technology isn’t there, but because the foundational work required to deploy it effectively hasn’t been done.

That foundational work, restructuring data from siloed systems, automating legacy manual processes, building AI-native workflows, is exactly what NextWave does. It positions the business as an enabler of AI adoption, growing in step with clients’ own investment programmes.

The Financial Services digital transformation market is growing at 14.7% CAGR to 2030, with Financial Services AI spend expected to grow at 29% per annum. NextWave is well placed to grow with that demand.

NextWave’s senior consultants have worked inside financial services firms at senior level before moving into consulting. They understand the operational and regulatory realities that tend to derail transformation work, not theoretically, but from direct experience. That client-side perspective shapes how the business scopes and delivers engagements from the outset.

Rather than deploying large teams on extended programmes, NextWave embeds senior technical consultants directly within client organisations, working quickly to demonstrate early results and reduce the execution risk typically associated with large transformation projects. The business has also developed its own suite of proprietary delivery tools and accelerators, ready-built solutions that can be adapted across clients reducing the time from brief to working outcome.

For Tier 1 financial services institutions that need to move quickly and demonstrate measurable progress, that model is increasingly compelling.

What stands out about NextWave is the depth of its client relationships and the breadth of its capabilities. Across data, automation, testing and transformation, the business works across the full spectrum of financial services, banks, asset managers, insurers and fintechs, with an approach built around solving problems that clients’ own teams have already grappled with.

The business has also built strong technology partnerships, working with 30 specialist platforms including Quantexa, Alteryx and Camunda. That breadth of vendor relationships, combined with a genuinely technology-agnostic approach, means NextWave can align its recommendations to the client’s best interest rather than being tied to any single platform.

This investment will support NextWave’s continued growth, expansion of the client-facing team, further development of its proprietary accelerators and AI tooling, and the deepening of existing client relationships across the sector.

As part of the investment, Colin Evans joins as Chair. Colin brings extensive experience scaling technology businesses, including as former COO of Detica, the technology and intelligence consultancy acquired by BAE Systems, and as NED of 6point6, the PE-backed financial services technology consultancy acquired by Accenture in 2023.

Roshan Puri, Partner at YFM, led the deal alongside Callum Long and David Wrench. “Financial services firms are under real pressure to move faster on AI and digital transformation and to do it in a way that actually delivers results. What stood out to us about NextWave is that the team understands both sides of that challenge: they have the client-side experience to know what good looks like operationally, and the technical capability to get there efficiently.

The business has built something genuinely differentiated in a market where the opportunity is significant and growing.

We’re looking forward to working with Tony Clark and the wider NextWave team as they continue to scale.”