Client Background
The client is a leading bank in Egypt with a growing cards and payments business spanning credit and debit issuing, point-of-sale acquiring and e-commerce. Its card processing relied on an incumbent third-party processor, with limited local control, a tightly coupled middleware layer and several overlapping initiatives, including a platform upgrade and tokenisation, all subject to central bank approvals and data residency expectations. The bank decided to migrate its issuing and acquiring to a leading global cards processor to localise control, modernise its stack and gain flexibility for new products. Cedar was engaged to lead phase one of the programme, establishing the foundations and governance needed before implementation could begin.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar structured phase one around six deliverable areas, acting as the bank's governance PMO and working alongside business, IT and the incoming processor to turn a strategic decision into an executable, well-governed programme.
Current State Review – Cedar reviewed the functional and technical capabilities of the existing cards portfolio, mapped card services and middleware procedures across the core banking, channel and scheme integrations, and identified the integration requirements the migration would need to address.
Business Case and Programme Plan – Cedar articulated the need for change and the expected benefits, estimated the end-to-end migration effort across people, infrastructure, vendors and compliance, and designed a high-level plan that split the migration into four workstreams, with point-of-sale and e-commerce acquiring in the first wave and credit and debit issuing in the second, sequenced around scheme certification, the seasonal scheme blackout period and a contingency buffer.
SOW and Contract Validation – Cedar reviewed the processor's statement of work against 13 inclusion areas, including scope, acceptance criteria, delay penalties, data migration cycles, parallel run and cutover, testing rounds and SLAs, and raised 22 observations on the master services agreement covering disaster recovery objectives, subcontracting consent, liability, audit rights, in-country data residency and transition support.
Risks, Decisions and Resourcing – Cedar maintained a log of key programme decisions and top risks with agreed mitigations, and designed the bank's project team structure across governance, acquiring, issuing, fraud and risk, IT and infrastructure, operations, certification and compliance, testing and data migration, together with an escalation and communication matrix.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
Phase one closed with all deliverables presented to the bank's steering committee, giving leadership a validated business case, a prioritised migration plan, a strengthened negotiating position on the processor's contract and a clearly defined programme organisation. Key decisions on migration timing, scope prioritisation and release sequencing were formally recorded, and dependencies on central bank approvals, scheme certification and the incumbent processor's support were surfaced early with named owners.
The way forward moves the programme into implementation: finalising point-of-sale terminal design, closing discovery with the processor, producing detailed acquiring plans, and commencing build alongside regulatory communication, with Cedar's governance PMO steering the bank team and processor through delivery.