Client Background
The client is a leading commercial bank in Saudi Arabia serving corporate, commercial, financial-institution, and private banking customers. Its credit underwriting, renewal, approval, administration, and deviation handling were still performed almost entirely manually, leaving the bank exposed to slow turnaround, elevated error rates, and exception-driven decisioning rather than standardized policy. Having selected a corporate credit management platform after a detailed evaluation, the bank wanted to use the rollout as the trigger to revisit its underlying credit policies, operating model, rating and pricing models, limit and collateral structures, delegation of authority, and approval workflows. To de-risk this end-to-end journey and provide independent governance over the vendor implementation, the bank engaged Cedar as its external transformation and program governance advisor.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar structured the engagement across people, process, and technology using its Process Transformation Framework and Implementation Governance Framework, delivered in two phases and led by a senior team spanning an Engagement Partner, an Engagement Lead, a senior consultant, and supporting consultants including an Arabic speaker. Phase 1, the design phase, was run over an approximately 20-week window.
Engagement Kickoff and Data Mobilization – Cedar opened with a kickoff across all key stakeholder groups and issued a data checklist on award of mandate, collecting current credit policy, process and requirement documentation, limit structures, approval matrices, and templates to hit the ground running from day one.
Stakeholder Workshops and As-Is Assessment – Cedar conducted interviews, discussions, and prolonged joint workshops with stakeholders across business, credit risk, credit administration, finance, operations, digital, and IT to map end-to-end process and customer journeys, surface pain points and interdependencies, and produce a validated assessment of the as-is process and artefacts.
To-Be Process and Artefact Redesign – Working in an agile, feedback-driven manner, Cedar reimagined and documented the to-be credit processes across the full use-case set and updated the supporting artefacts, including corporate credit policies, the obligor and facility risk-rating models, limit structure, early-warning-signal approach, pricing strategy, RAROC, delegation of authority, authority matrix, approval workflow, operating model, and document templates.
Target State Architecture and Requirements – Cedar reviewed the application landscape and integration touchpoints, resolved pending architectural decisions through decision papers, designed the target solution architecture, and documented the business, integration, reporting, and technical requirements handed to the solution vendor for implementation.
Migration, Vendor SOW, and Master Plan – Given a wholly manual, paper-based starting point, Cedar evaluated migration options and defined the data migration, reconciliation, and rollout approach, then helped finalize the vendor statement of work and the master program and resource plan before handover to the bank PMO.
Implementation Advisory and Program Governance – In Phase 2, Cedar provided independent governance and implementation advisory alongside the bank PMO, attending steering and operating committee forums, vetting status reporting, and preparing independent health-checks using its RAPID framework to give senior management added assurance over vendor delivery, testing, data migration, and change adoption.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
By the close of the design phase, the bank had a fully documented target operating model for its corporate credit function, a target solution architecture, and a vendor-ready set of business, integration, reporting, and technical requirements — the foundation for moving from a manual, deviation-heavy credit process to a standardized, automated one across its corporate, commercial, financial-institution, and private banking segments. Cedar's independent governance through the implementation phase gave the steering committee assurance over vendor delivery, testing, data migration, and change management, while a bilingual change and training approach supported seamless adoption.
The way forward is a phased, multi-quarter rollout in which the bank first activates new credit applications and renewals and progressively extends automation to the remaining use cases, realizing quick wins early and scaling value as adoption matures across the organization.