Built on decades of hands-on expertise in running multinational financial service operations, providing outsourced managed service operations, and continuously driving digital acceleration, Fexco Advisory Services is helping clients in Ireland’s private and public sectors to deal with rapidly changing and increasingly complex business and operational environments.
Established two years ago, the business leverages Fexco’s deep heritage in operational excellence and innovation to deliver practical value adding solutions for clients.
“Fexco has been around for a very long time,” says Fexco Managed and Advisory Service managing director Martin Ryan. “The company has been running business operations on behalf of clients and managing a global foreign exchange and payments business for the past 45 years. We decided to put all that experience to work on behalf of clients. We provide advisory services grounded in practical experience, not theory. It is our experience, not someone else’s and it is grounded in what works, what doesn’t work, and in our mistakes and our successes over the years and what we have learned from them.”
This makes the business stand out in the market, he points out. “When I look back, I trained to be a business and technology consultant straight out of college. That was great for me, and I wouldn’t say a bad word about that career choice for anyone, but it meant I was advising clients without any practical experience to back it up. It was very theoretical and based on other people’s experiences, not mine and it wasn’t until I worked in operations that I learned the difference. At Fexco Advisory Services our team have first-hand experience in the areas they advise on. That qualifies them to help organisations solve specific business problems, develop new strategies and implement transformation programmes.”
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The business focuses on the Irish market. “We figured out what would work best for us and our clients and decided to stay small and niche with a focus on providing personalised and tailored services to Irish private and public sector organisations,” he says. “That model has worked well. We are very busy, and we are quite selective in the projects we take on. We have no interest in being the biggest, what we are interested in is delivering most value to our clients.”
There is also a degree of selectivity in terms of the services offered. “We focus on the areas of expertise where we can most effectively support clients,” he says. “Broadly speaking, these are spread across seven pillars.”
Those pillars are project and portfolio management; management consulting; customer excellence; operational excellence; digital services; energy and ESG advisory; and function-specific advisory in areas such as grant management.
“Within those pillars we help to deliver projects, achieve efficiencies, improve operations, enhance customer experience, implement technology changes and administer business process changes,” Ryan adds.
“There are two sides to the professional services market,” he continues. “At one end of the spectrum there is business process and operations outsourcing and at the other there is high end consulting. We sit in the middle. Advisory and Managed Services are not separate offerings – they’re collaborative. We do both the operations and the advisory piece. We occupy a position in the middle where we blend the operations and advisory elements to create a high value offering for our clients.”
This integrated approach ensures that strategic advice is seamlessly translated into actionable solutions, delivering tangible outcomes for clients. “Again, we are able to do this because of the way we leverage Fexco’s vast experience,” says Ryan. “Running complex operations either for our own business interests, or on behalf of our clients has been part of Fexco’s core business for decades. This allows us to advise with credibility and implement with precision.”
Possibly because of Fexco’s long history of providing outsourced services to Irish public sector organisations, the majority of the advisory services business’s clients are in that area, he adds.
“The public sector faces unique challenges as it strives for digital transformation and operational efficiency,” he notes. “Government bodies must navigate the intricacies of integrating legacy systems with new technologies, securing sensitive data, providing a personalised and efficient customer service, and ensuring compliance with ever evolving regulations. These are not just theoretical challenges; they are real-world issues that require solutions grounded in practical experience that we can provide.
“From project management to digital services, our advisory solutions are tailored to meet the specific needs of public sector organisations, ensuring they can achieve their transformation goals while maintaining daily service delivery,” he adds. “By combining operational expertise with strategic insight, we help public sector bodies implement changes effectively, mitigating risks and ensuring compliance. This is not just about providing advice; it’s about partnering with our clients to deliver tangible outcomes that align with their strategic objectives, such as the work we are currently doing with Tailte Éireann, working alongside them in support of the implementation of their digital transformation strategy, and several other engagements across our public and private sector partners.”
Fexco Advisory Services is also harnessing cutting edge digital and AI innovations as it helps clients not just to run their organisations but transform them. “Everyone is dabbling in AI now,” says Ryan. “But it’s not new at Fexco. We’ve been using it for many years across the organisation. You really would want to have head in the sand not to be considering the impacts of AI on your business right now. We have several real-life applications of AI in action within our business, including the creation of our own AI platform called SmartAssist to support our staff and clients to ‘make their lives easier’.”
SmartAssist couples the power of generative AI (GenAI) alongside other innovative digital technologies, and under the watchful eye of Fexco’s Head of Privacy and AI Governance is leveraged to understand large quantities of unstructured data in a secure environment to produce validated and structured intelligent interactions and insights, he explains. “It helps us to become more productive and serve our clients better.”
The tool was created by Fexco’s Innovation and New Ventures division. “Fexco has three divisions covering payments, business services, and innovation and new ventures. The way I describe the innovation division is it’s our playground. It allows us to experiment with new
technologies and identify issues of the future and develop solutions for them before they become problems for our clients.”
The expertise and experience of the innovation team is leveraged on behalf of clients. “We looked at generative AI (GenAI) and got our heads around how to advise on it and how to use it in our managed services and advisory work. We are not just telling clients how to use it; we are basing that advice on how we use it ourselves in our own operations. We are able to go to clients and say here is the story, here are the pitfalls, here’s what you need to think about, here’s what the book doesn’t tell you. And, most importantly, here’s how to realise value from it.”
Innovation isn’t a new thing at Fexco, Ryan adds. “It’s not a buzzword we’ve just brought in. It goes back to the foundation of the company when our founder Brian McCarthy innovated and solved a customer challenge of American tourists visiting Kerry and wanting to easily convert their dollars into pounds. It’s been a story of constant innovation since then including the invention of Dynamic Currency Conversion, tax-free shopping, PACE and many more. We will remain forward thinking and curious and that will help us to develop new solutions for our clients. That’s been the culture for the past 44 years, and it will stay that way.”
Looking ahead, he says the focus is on continued growth in the Irish market. “There are plenty of growth opportunities in the areas we support,” he says. “We want to provide cost effective value adding services to private and public sector clients who genuinely want the best for Ireland Inc.”
