Summary

Technology is changing rapidly. Country and regional regulations like open banking, payments, PSD2, among others are forcing banks to reinvent themselves. It thus becomes imperative that banks and financial institutions adapt to the changing technology. Enterprise Architecture is at the heart of the technology infrastructure of the bank. Defining the bank's enterprise architecture is core to its applications and data and technology architecture, aligned to the business model.

Cedar has been assisting global banks in developing their enterprise architecture. Cedar has a well-proven track record of providing in-depth insight and execution to conduct the architecture study across business, data, application, and technology. We make strategy and innovation work.

Developing the correct enterprise architecture is the building blocks to achieving technological success. There are different frameworks available to ensure success. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), Zachman Framework are the fundamental framework used to assess the enterprise. The architecture is built on a set of design principles or guidelines on which future decisions and rationalizations are based.

How we add value

Cedar helps define the enterprise architecture representing the bank's IT strategy, aligned to its overall business strategy.

  • Design Principles: Cedar assists banks to identify best in class design principles across business, application, data, and technology. These principles are leveraged for rationalizing the applications and technology utilized by the bank.
  • Application Classification: Cedar's proprietary 8-layer architecture helps define the overall framework across channels, front, mid, back office, analytics, support function, external payments, and the middleware connectors. These layers are core to the bank and represent both the business imperatives depending on the nature of the bank's business model and the operating model, including in-house or outsourced functionality.
  • Application Decisioning: Cedar's 8-layer architecture also helps identify if the applications should be retained, replaced, evaluated, or sunset. This plays a crucial role in determining the scope of the respective projects planned.
  • Target Architecture Blueprint: The end-state architecture blueprint is then developed, using the 7 core principles of functionality, consolidation, adaptability, scalability, inter-operability, rationalization, and customization. The applications that sit across each of these layers are then reviewed for their fitment, to conclude a retain-replace-upgrade decision, with insights drawn from over 300+ supplier solutions from the rich knowledgebase driven by its Fintech research unit, IBS Intelligence.

The fast-track approach of Cedar ensures the outcome of the enterprise architecture design dovetails quickly into the follow-on initiatives, including an IT selection exercise, to institutionalize the end-state architecture designed rapidly.

Client Cases

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