AURORA

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Aurora is a London-based boutique consultancy with global reach. With decades of real life business and technology expertise, we are by your side to help shape and deliver your biggest business ideas.
9.3
Exceptional

AURORA Business Information

Former Financial Services leaders rather than consultants, with decades of experience across all customer segments and spanning functions including COO, strategy, technology, change delivery, sales and risk.

Aurora has a proven track record of helping businesses of all sizes, from global banks to start-ups. We are passionate about helping our customers across our three disciplines; strategy, design and execution.

Reviews

Overview (All Reviews)
Timeline
9.3
Exceptional
4 Reviews
Insider Reviews

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Client Reviews
πŸ™Š Communication
πŸ™Š Communication
2.0
9.0
🧠 Knowledge & Skills
🧠 Knowledge & Skills
4.0
9.0
🎁 Ability to Deliver
🎁 Ability to Deliver
6.0
9.8
πŸ€‘ Value for Money
πŸ€‘ Value for Money
8.0
9.0
πŸš€ Innovation, Creativity & Technology
πŸš€ Innovation, Creativity & Technology
10
9.5
Company Reviews
Serge Acker
10
Β«Key with Aurora is the very deep knowledge they had of the banking sectorΒ»

β€œMy name is Serge Acker, I'm the CEO of a company called OCL, which is a software platform for customer engagement and acquisition. We're a small startup and 10 people focused on software as a service. We're lucky to have a technology that is versatile enough that it can apply to different things. [Watch Trailer ](https://vimeo.com/522742966) **What was the main business challenge you tried to resolve?** The challenge always is - you think you have a great idea. How does it stack up against the market? How is it going to be perceived? How do you need to package it? It's always nice to have people who have that breadth of experience who can help you hone in on what are the key messages, what are the key pillars of the product that are going to resonate with your market. Originally, the company was focused on developing solutions for content owners to monetize their content and apps. But really what the platform does is understand how transactions are made without necessarily needing personal data. So the music business took a little longer to evolve, and we transformed it into a zero knowledge authentication platform that can connect brands with people without the need to track who they are, their phone number and things like that. **What were your goals and objectives? ** When we got in touch with Aurora, I think the one of the challenges we had is we had a very good grasp of the music business and certainly the retail business on my side and luxury. We also knew that in the context of authentication, we needed to penetrate a market which was harder for us to penetrate, which could give us a sort of a seal of approval on authentication and seriousness, which is the banking industry. So partly in terms of using them as a distribution network. Part of our technology required the sale of a token that could be bought in a store or in our vision, could use a network of trusted branches (like bank branches) or post offices, which would then deliver a service to the end user to certify that they are what they said they were. But we also thought that the banking sector could be one where we could provide our services beyond that. So that was to be our entry point that we had. We struggled in terms of how that could be more immediately beneficial and what type of products we could offer the banking industry. That's where Aurora came in. **Did you manage to solve your challenge and how? ** Going into the workshop, we had a vague idea of where we wanted to go into the banking sector. Coming out of it, we had a very clear sense of four or five products that we needed to define a little bit more, but a very clear idea of what we could offer, who we could offer it to and how to present it. In the next stage of the interaction was meant to be actually building a pitch with Aurora to actually go and meet people. Sadly, a bunch of things happened, all of this was sort of mid-2019. Our first product was meant to go to market, didn't go to market for a bunch of Brexit related reasons. So we had to pivot on a dime. Nothing to do with Aurora's expertise. The context is that the market changed. So we had to put that exploration on pause. **What was the impact on your business?** I think it certainly improved our prospects in terms of fundraising, for example. Going into fundraises, initially we were talking about music, about a potential product that could improve the ability for businesses to authenticate without using personal data. Adding banking to this was a credible source of product and revenue generation. It helped our prospects. **What were your key decision factors to opt for Aurora?** There is a deep knowledge of the banking sector in Aurora. Both the principles we engaged with. They’ve spent decades in the banking industry, knew how the banking industry works, especially from a software standpoint. So for us, it was a no brainer to engage with them because they made a lot of sense. ”

Vincent Pou
LB Networks
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
9.2
Β«I think Aurora is a really good choiceΒ»

β€œMy name is Vincent and I am the co-founder at LB Networks. My company's business focus is to generate leads and find clients on behalf of our own clients. So essentially helping on the sales side of our clients and supporting them. [Watch Trailer](https://vimeo.com/514618712) **What was the main business challenge you tried to resolve?** The main challenge for us was to figure out the direction to move our business from a B2B service business to a completely different model, which is a SaaS model (software as a service) in terms of strategy, support, technology, etc. **How did you solve it?** So essentially, we have solved it by having workshop sessions with Josh and Sean at Aurora. They helped us to figure out a strategy to adopt and to move to SaaS business model. We solved it by identifying our strengths, competitive positioning of our model, solutions and putting it into practice to build a commercial and pricing strategy around it. **What was the impact on your business? ** We're really clear about core competencies and strength and in the direction to take for our SaaS model. The impact has also been in terms of pricing strategy and identifying our target audience, target customers and how to reach out to them. They helped us to create a valuable package for customers in which they could identify everything around: pricing the package, software and to phrase to different perks that come with the software. **What were your key success factors? ** Our key success factors were to have some clarity in our roadmap. Basically, put milestones into our project and identify the right the truck to go on to start-ups things. I mean, to build a company, develop our project and to also build a sensible pricing strategy, identify our target audiences and how we're going to approach them. Also, to identify our proposition and show to our customers. These were the things that we wanted to work on with Aurora and we figured it all out. ”

Jeremy Arnold
Mudrā
Founder & Director
9.4
Β«It was a full transition, basically to a brand new business.Β»

β€œMy mane is Jeremy Arnold, I’m founder and company director of Mudra. We provide foundational support for immigration law firms. We provide a business that essentially enables immigration law firms to focus on what they're really good at, which is immigration law. And then we've created a business that provides supporting structures that enables them to do that. So, for example, we've got clerking services, administrative services, business plan services, wellbeing services, pretty much anything that provides foundational support, that enables law firms to focus on billable work. Usually when there's not a pandemic on we are based in central London. We provide our services all across the UK. [Watch Full Interview Video](https://vimeo.com/529314685 "Watch Full Interview Video") **What were your goals and objectives?** Whenever my business grows a bit, I always know my limitations and then I'm looking to find people to support me. Also my industry has changed so much in the last 20 years. The company's constantly having to change and reinvent itself around, immigration rules and regulations, and immigration processes and systems. Constant evolution, where I started working with Aurora, that was a really pivotal part for me because I've wanted to create brand new services that were slightly outside of my immediate vision. **What was the main business challenge you tried to resolve?** I really needed support to be able to reinvent the company. I rebranded from: we were logistics and process company, providing logistical support in the form of clerks to immigration law firms. And the thing is, we found that was just too narrow. So then we had to widen out and provide more, bigger smorgasbord of services that we knew that our customers were or clients that they could benefit from. That was the biggest challenge, I think, reinventing what the actual business does and then rebranding that business. Coming up with brand new services that are of value and need in the marketplace I work in, and then putting all of those systems in place and getting staff trained up to be able to deliver all of those different services. And then, go out there and have people know about them and sell them. **Why did you decide to do business with Aurora?** I've known Sean who runs Aurora for a long time, and I needed somebody who could support me with that level of practical thinking. The whole team there are very good at being able to think logically and strategically very quickly. This is something that I can do also, but often I find that I might need to muse on something for a few days or a week before I'm kind of - that's right. But these guys are really like: "No, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. Have you thought about that? Actually, let's just put that into a spreadsheet and see if this practically works, or maybe this does, maybe that doesn't." That's one of the reasons I went to them for that high level of being able to think about things. **What were your key decision factors to opt for Aurora?** I've had 20 years in my business and all of the pasts of running this business for 20 years - you bring it with you. I know, I'm thinking about my business from the way it's been. And then sitting down with a team of people that can think newly inside from their perspective was radical and being able to think,"OK, what about this business or whatever or this service?" ”