Client Background
The client is a premier commercial bank in Oman with a historically corporate-focused franchise, conventional and Islamic windows, and a growing ambition in retail banking. Some years earlier, Cedar had assessed the bank's digital readiness and helped shape a digital strategy that the bank then expanded into a broad portfolio of initiatives spanning retail, corporate and bank-wide programmes. With much of that portfolio delivered or in flight, leadership wanted an objective view of how far the bank had actually moved, whether the original benchmarks still reflected the market, and where the next wave of investment should go. Cedar was engaged to run a digital maturity refresh, alongside a diagnostic of the core banking estate and validation of the way-forward digital and core roadmap.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar re-applied its six-dimension digital maturity framework, which scores digital customer experience, onboarding, product convergence, process fulfilment, channel adoption and technology platform on a five-level scale from Limited to Leader, and ran the work over roughly ten weeks in three modules: a digital market overview and internal assessment, a core banking assessment, and a way-forward digital and core roadmap.
Cedar held more than ten leadership conversations across business, wholesale, retail, Islamic banking, operations, finance, product, compliance, IT and the enterprise PMO, and traced progress on every initiative proposed in the original strategy as well as those the bank had added since. For each dimension, Cedar documented the starting position, the initiatives that had moved the bank forward, its current level and the specific drivers needed to reach the top of the scale, supported by analysis of digital customer growth and channel usage trends.
Because digital banking had moved on since the first assessment, Cedar also refreshed the scale itself, raising the bar at each level to reflect current expectations such as AI-assisted onboarding, behavioural personalisation, contextual and immersive channels and cloud-native, low-code platforms. The bank was then positioned on both the original and the refreshed scales, so leadership could see real progress without overstating maturity against today's market.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The refresh confirmed that the bank had made significant strides, moving from a limited digital position to a standard-to-moderate level of maturity, with notable gains in onboarding, digital process automation, new channels and an established innovation lab. It also made clear that the next stage of progress depended less on new front-end features and more on foundations: a dedicated customer experience function with regular voice-of-customer insight, analytics-driven segmentation and product bundling, automation of trade and lending processes, and a core platform with stronger API support.
As the way forward, Cedar recommended focusing investment on the technology platform and data intelligence, evaluating suitable core banking options, and completing the bank's data and omnichannel programmes, which would move product convergence and channel adoption up the refreshed scale.