What we do

Two worlds. One practice.

Most advisory firms understand banks or startups. Rarely both. We sit at the intersection — and that's where the hardest problems live.

Financial Institutions

Compliance costs climb. Headcount grows. Results don't. We redesign operating models, eliminate structural waste, and turn compliance from a cost center into a precision machine.

Cost Optimization Operating Model Compliance Transformation

Fintechs & Scale-ups

You've built the product. Now land the institutional clients that take 9 months to onboard a vendor. We build the ops infrastructure, governance, and fluency that get you through procurement.

Institutional Readiness Enterprise Onboarding Ops Structuring

Track record

Results, not frameworks.

16+ years of delivery across tier-1 institutions and high-growth fintech — always at the intersection of strategy and operations.

€3M

ARR scaled in 10 months across 4 markets

11

Institutional clients onboarded — hedge funds & tier-1 banks

75%

Reduction in enterprise integration time

€15M

Structural cost efficiencies for a top-tier banking group

Background

Built on both sides of the table.

In-house strategic advisor to C-level executives at tier-1 banks — driving multi-million euro cost programs and operating model redesigns across retail, insurance, and asset management.

Then COO of a B2B fintech in securities financing — building revenue operations from scratch, onboarding institutional clients across four continents, and navigating the compliance and procurement gauntlets that kill most startup deals.

Before that, ten years of management consulting across investment banking transformation, regulatory programs, and large-scale organizational change.

Élias Benyettou, Founder of Delinah Advisory

Élias Benyettou

Founder & Principal

Operations executive with 16+ years across tier-1 banks and B2B fintech. Former COO scaling institutional SaaS operations. Previously in-house strategic advisor at BNP Paribas.

Dual fluency in institutional governance and startup execution. Based in Paris, working across Europe's financial centres and beyond when the mandate calls for it.

Case Study

B2B Fintech — Institutional Onboarding

Built and operated the end-to-end onboarding function for a B2B SaaS platform serving institutional finance — orchestrating technical integration, legal, procurement, compliance, and security workstreams as a single accountable operator.

Onboarding cycle reduced from 6+ months to under 2 months

How we work

Senior-only. No delegation.

Every engagement is led and delivered by the same person. No handoff, no learning on your budget.

01

Embedded, not external

Working alongside your teams, not presenting to them. Strategy that survives contact with real operations.

02

Scoped to the problem

From multi-month transformation programs to targeted two-day diagnostics. Format follows the challenge, not billing targets.

03

Dual fluency

Institutional governance and startup execution in the same engagement. Tier-1 compliance standards with fintech delivery speed.

Common questions

What clients usually ask first.

Every engagement starts with a 30-minute conversation — no pitch deck, no pre-packaged methodology. We talk through the specific operational challenge, what's been tried, and where the friction actually lives. From there, we scope a focused diagnostic or go directly to a transformation mandate, depending on how clearly the problem is defined.

For financial institutions, typically €500M+ in revenue — large enough for structural complexity to be the constraint, not headcount. For fintechs, usually Series A and beyond, where institutional clients are the target but the operations and governance haven't yet caught up with the ambition. The work is always high-stakes and specific.

All engagements operate under strict NDA from day one. Given our work sits at the intersection of compliance, cost programs, and procurement — areas where information is acutely sensitive — confidentiality is treated as a hard constraint, not a courtesy. The case descriptions shared on this site are fully anonymized and genericized.

Contact

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