Client Background
The client is a leading Islamic bank in South Asia that has grown rapidly and is investing across digital channels, payments, cards and risk platforms. Its long-serving core banking platform was approaching vendor end of life, carried heavy historical customisation, and constrained the bank through lengthy branch-by-branch end-of-day processing, manual reporting and dependence on the vendor for routine configuration changes. At the same time, the bank was preparing to replace its internet and mobile banking platform, and the Board had posed specific questions on how the two transformations should be sequenced and resourced. Cedar was engaged to reassess the current technology landscape and design the core banking way forward to support the Board's decision.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied its diagnostic framework across applications, technology architecture and IT organisation, building on an earlier Cedar review and structuring the final report around the five key asks from the Board: the core banking path, a resource plan for concurrent programmes, integration sequencing and rework, a short-term bridge for corporate customers, and a comparison of current and future digital banking capabilities.
Stakeholder Conversations and Data Review – Cedar held conversations with more than 55 stakeholders across 17 departments, including 12 members of executive leadership, key technology vendors and four peer banks running the same core platform, and reviewed 36 strategic, technical and contractual documents.
Diagnostic Review – Cedar tracked the status of earlier recommendations, mapped the bank's application estate across the eight layers of Cedar's applications architecture to surface gaps, evaluated an infrastructure expansion business case, and proposed a target IT organisation structure.
Core Banking Options – Cedar assessed functional, technical and vendor gaps in the incumbent platform, benchmarked peer banks that had upgraded or migrated, scanned the universal core banking market, and evaluated three paths: status quo with fixes, upgrade to the vendor's latest release, or replacement with a new Islamic core.
Sequencing, Resourcing and Prioritisation – Cedar compared digital-first and core-first transformation sequences alongside an interim corporate banking enhancement bridge, designed an indicative squad model with a shared governance team and independent PMO, and prioritised 15 initiatives from the bank's wider portfolio into three delivery horizons.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The Board received direct, evidence-based answers to each of its questions, including a clear view that remaining on the current release was not viable, the trade-offs between upgrading and replacing the core, the integration implications of each sequencing option, and the dedicated and shared resources a phased programme would demand. The prioritised initiative roadmap placed core banking transformation, digital channel renewal, infrastructure expansion, a customer 360 view and middleware modernisation in the immediate horizon, with data, trade finance, risk analytics and automation initiatives following.
The agreed next steps are Board approval of the key initiatives, contracting with the selected digital banking vendor, mobilisation of the programme team and formal programme initiation, supported by a detailed API readiness and integration assessment at the outset to validate delivery effort and sequencing.