Client Situation
Cedar assisted a leading commercial bank in enhancing its Liquidity Management and Virtual Accounts offerings. The client operated with a plain vanilla solution and needed an elaborate solution with updated functionalities such as customized payment processing and sweep structure, VA split, dashboards, and advanced horizontal and vertical sweep.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar took an elaborate approach to provide PMO assistance and workstream coordination involving bank teams and the vendor to ensure the successful rollout of the new liquidity management and virtual accounts solution:
- Program Charter: Cedar prepared a program charter that outlined the program objectives and plans with key milestones, a governance framework, an escalation matrix, key stakeholders, and critical success factors for the program.
- Governance: Cedar conducted governance and monitoring activities by following up with key stakeholders while assimilating program status against planned timelines. Dependency factors were highlighted, and major deviations from the agreed timelines would be escalated.
- Quality Management: Quality standards conformance and risk impact monitoring were closely monitored throughout the course of the program.
- Workstream Coordination: Cedar designed a testing approach based on industry practices, including testing procedures, entry and exit criteria, as well as quality checkpoints. Adherence to pre-defined criteria was monitored and key stakeholders were held responsible.
- Vendor Coordination: Active vendor coordination was conducted to complete milestones and facilitate resolution for key bottlenecks or related escalations.
- Go live for 2 phases on a fast-track basis within 7 months.
- Onboarding new corporate and retail clients led to increased transaction volume for the bank.
Outcome
Cedar assisted the client with consolidating and prioritizing business requirements for a phase-wise release. With Cedar's expertise, the client achieved: