Client Background
The client is a leading bank in Jordan with a regional footprint and a broad franchise spanning corporate, retail, treasury, trade finance and Islamic banking. Its ledgers were split across the core banking platform, a separate digital-bank ledger and several sub-ledger systems, with the final ledger and chart of accounts effectively maintained at data warehouse level through manual reconciliation. Procurement, asset management, budgeting and project management also ran on siloed, largely manual processes. Following Cedar's earlier ledger diagnostic, the bank decided to implement a centralised, automated and scalable enterprise general ledger with supporting ERP modules, and mandated Cedar to run the selection of a best-in-class platform.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar ran the selection using its FTV Evaluation framework, which scores suppliers on weighted Functional, Technical and Vendor criteria before commercial and contractual review, with weights agreed with the bank's team and the enterprise ledger carrying the greatest functional emphasis. The work moved through five modules:
Requirements and RFP Design – Cedar drafted and validated the business requirements through workshops, producing around six hundred functional and four hundred technical requirements across roughly ninety capabilities. Functional scope covered the enterprise ledger, procurement, inventory and fixed asset management, budgeting and project management; technical scope covered data warehouse integration, application security and non-security requirements such as integration, performance, DevOps and disaster recovery.
Long-List to Shortlist – Cedar prepared and issued an RFI to five leading suppliers, applied mandatory criteria to the responses and shortlisted three suppliers for the RFP and detailed demonstrations.
Scripted Product Demonstrations – Cedar orchestrated around sixty hours of sessions covering some three hundred demo scenarios, with around twenty bank participants from procurement, finance, data, IT, security, architecture, the PMO and the CEO office scoring what they saw.
Weighted Evaluation – Cedar consolidated functional, technical and vendor scores, assessing each supplier's company profile, team strength, implementation track record, product roadmap and regional reference sites, and documented salient features, key limitations and customisation or integration gaps by module.
Implementation Sequencing – Cedar framed a phased path in which the new ledger and ERP modules are first integrated with the existing core banking system and later re-wired to the new core once that selection concludes.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The evaluation gave the steering committee a transparent, evidence-based comparison of the shortlisted platforms. It endorsed a primary and a secondary best-fit supplier to proceed to commercial and contractual negotiation, removed a third supplier because of technical gaps and integration shortfalls, and increased the weight given to vendor capability to reflect the importance of proven implementation strength in the region.
As the way forward, Cedar recommended that the bank appoint a negotiation committee drawing on audit and legal, operations, finance and IT leadership, award the mandate to the best-fit supplier, and run a discovery phase to finalise requirements, confirm customisation gaps and agree a detailed implementation plan for its finance transformation.