Client Background
The client is a leading commercial bank in the UAE serving retail, SME and corporate customers alongside treasury and trade finance activities. Many of its core customer and operations processes had evolved over time without a common baseline, resulting in manual handoffs, inconsistent service levels and limited visibility of where effort and risk were concentrated. The bank recognised that improving customer journeys and operational efficiency required a complete view of its process landscape before any redesign. It engaged Cedar to catalogue its business processes, redesign the highest-priority ones, and then define the governance and execution model needed to carry the redesigned processes into implementation.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar followed a structured process re-imagination methodology moving from business process analysis and cataloguing through shortlisting, redesign and validation, and then into its C-SCORE execution methodology for governing implementation.
Process Catalogue – Cedar built a comprehensive inventory of 250 business processes across retail, corporate, operations and treasury, identifying key challenges and gaps in the current-state landscape.
Process Shortlist – The catalogue was narrowed to 100 high-priority processes and then to 40 critical processes selected on transaction volume, customer impact and operational pain points; the bank's team added a further 11, bringing the redesign scope to 51.
Process Redesign – Cedar redesigned all 51 priority processes, spanning account opening and KYC or KYB updates, credit proposals, personal and mortgage lending, term deposit servicing, credit card lifecycle and dispute handling, remittances, cheque clearing, letters of credit and guarantees, salary processing, FX deals and customer complaints. Validation workshops secured stakeholder alignment before the finalised designs were handed over to the implementation team, with the phase completed ahead of schedule.
Governance and Execution PMO – For the implementation phase, Cedar designed a programme governance module covering charter and planning, risk and dependency management, schedule, scope and change control, escalation, vendor selection and management, quality assurance and documentation, supported by a three-tier structure of a monthly steering committee, a fortnightly senior management working group and a weekly project working committee. An execution PMO module organises delivery into workstreams for discovery and design, build and customisation, testing and validation, change management and training, and deployment and support, tracked through Cedar's PRIMATECH PMO tool and RAPID dashboards.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The bank now has a single, end-to-end catalogue of its business processes and 51 redesigned priority processes that have been validated with stakeholders and handed over for execution. The prioritisation logic gives management a transparent basis for sequencing further improvement beyond the first wave.
The proposed way forward is a governance and execution PMO over approximately twelve months, delivering the redesigned processes in four waves, with independent progress reviews, risk tracking and regular reporting to the steering committee and the board.