Client Background
The client is a leading Islamic bank in Egypt with retail, corporate, SME and treasury businesses, in the middle of a core banking replacement alongside new channel, payments and workflow initiatives. Its application landscape was wide but fragmented, with unclear system ownership, outdated platforms, heavily manual back-office and finance reporting processes, and no enterprise architecture or quality assurance function to steer technology choices. Data management was largely outsourced, and the in-house development team needed new skills to support the incoming core platform. As part of a broader engagement that also covered RFP design, vendor selection and a business and IT resource assessment, Cedar was mandated to review the bank's enterprise architecture and define the way forward.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar followed its four-step enterprise architecture review approach: an internal assessment of data across more than forty-two areas, interviews with over forty-five stakeholders across nineteen departments, analysis with preliminary observations shared with key stakeholders, and a final report. The work covered five modules:
Department Assessment – Cedar analysed each business, operations, control and IT department, rating the fitment of its systems and capturing gaps and aspirations, from loan origination and profitability reporting to data quality, development capacity and IT governance.
Application and Functional Blueprint – Using Cedar's 8-Layer Application Architecture, every system was assessed for functional, technical and financial fitment and placed in a retain, upgrade, evaluate, replace, new or in-transit bucket. Eight design principles, including out-of-the-box adoption, open-source and cost-effective technology, API-driven development, squad-based agile delivery and secure-by-design resilience, shaped the target applications blueprint.
Data and Integration Architecture – Cedar defined data principles centred on data sovereignty and local regulatory compliance, and a seven-component target data platform running from enterprise sources through a lakehouse, enrichment, an enterprise data warehouse and data marts to visualisation and AI use cases. An API-first, event-driven integration architecture with standardised middleware and centralised API management complemented it.
Infrastructure Review and Core Sizing – Cedar reviewed databases, application servers, operating systems and branch bandwidth, and assessed infrastructure options for the new core, comparing virtual machine and container deployments and setting an interim and a longer-term target for the end-of-day batch window based on eight decision factors.
Governance and Capability Building – Cedar set out an EA charter with interim and target EA office structures, and a centralised core banking centre of excellence to build internal expertise and reduce vendor dependency.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The review gave the bank an integrated target blueprint and a single initiatives portfolio that combines its in-flight programmes with 15 Cedar-recommended opportunities. These include corporate loan origination, asset-liability management automation, profitability and funds transfer pricing, a dedicated CRM, enterprise fraud management, transaction banking, enterprise reconciliation, data governance and quality, and the establishment of enterprise architecture, quality assurance and core banking centre of excellence functions, all phased across a multi-year roadmap.
The agreed next steps are to build a detailed three-year plan with cross-dependencies, secure management approval and buy-in for each initiative, right-staff and upskill the teams, and select and onboard technology and implementation partners for the first wave.