Client Background
The client is a leading bank in the UAE with an international footprint spanning multiple countries. It was running a multi-country core banking upgrade, with several country rollouts under way and more planned, alongside greenfield implementations and a large estate of surround applications affected by each release. Decentralised vendor management, country-by-country customisation and fragmented systems were slowing new product launches and upgrades, creating data silos and leaving critical platform knowledge with third parties. The bank engaged Cedar to design a Core Banking Centre of Excellence that would centralise control, standardise the platform and operations across businesses and countries, and retain capability in-house.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar combined an outside-in view of how leading banks structure core banking centres of excellence with its RAPID Framework, which checks resources, application, process, infrastructure and data readiness at every stage of a core programme. The design progressed through five connected modules.
Context and CoE Model – Cedar assessed the drivers for a CoE, from harmonisation and faster time to market to cost and data optimisation, and evaluated centralised, hub-and-spoke and distributed CoE models against the bank's operating context and regional practices.
Functions and Deliverables – The CoE was defined across three verticals covering planning, transformation and change, and support, with 18 deliverables mapped to 27 functions, from strategy, architecture and compliance to testing, data migration, release management, end-of-day operations, CI/CD, API governance and information security.
Organisation and Staffing – Cedar designed a team structure of 25 roles, recommended in-house, partner or hybrid sourcing for each, set out an onshore-offshore delivery model that scales up or down with project complexity, identified role gaps to be filled through upskilling or onboarding, and wrote job descriptions for 17 key positions.
Governance and Maturity – A six-tier forum structure, from daily huddles to working, core, IT, partner and executive steering committees, was defined alongside CoE performance measures across customer, process, people and system dimensions. A three-level maturity model was used to baseline the current state through interviews and document reviews, showing most functions at a basic-to-intermediate level with manual testing and releases, scattered artefacts and heavy vendor dependency.
Operating Model and Toolkit – Cedar documented the delivery life-cycle from requirements to post go-live, RAPID-based checklists for each phase, standard artefacts and templates, evaluation criteria for knowledge and execution partners, RACI matrices and operating principles for managing risk across the life-cycle.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The final report gave the bank a complete blueprint for its Core Banking CoE, including a charter with vision, mission and programme statement, a clear division of responsibilities across planning, change and support, and a governance model that places vendors and partners under consistent oversight. The design positions the CoE to drive a standardised platform across countries, accelerate upgrades and product launches, and keep institutional knowledge within the bank.
Next steps centre on a resource planning exercise to close the identified role gaps, phased onboarding of in-house and partner talent, and progressive movement of each function up the maturity model as rollouts continue.