Client Background
The client is a leading private-sector bank in India with a broad retail, agricultural and specialised lending portfolio spanning housing, vehicle, gold, education, personal, commercial vehicle and fintech-partnered loans as well as credit cards. Origination across these product lines ran on multiple disparate systems, resulting in manual, disjointed customer and credit journeys and inconsistent decisioning. The bank set out to consolidate onto a single, unified loan origination platform with an integrated business rules engine and a post-sales servicing interface to its existing loan management system. Cedar was mandated to define the requirements, run a structured market evaluation and recommend the best-fit supplier.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied its FTV Evaluation framework, scoring every shortlisted solution on weighted functional, technical and vendor criteria, within a staged programme that moved from requirements gathering to RFP, demonstrations and final recommendation.
Requirements Gathering – Cedar ran 26 workshops with more than 30 stakeholders across product, credit, risk, compliance, operations, IT and the digital centre of excellence, documenting around 900 business requirements that were signed off by unit owners.
Vendor Shortlisting and RFP – Starting from a longlist of 19 suppliers, Cedar applied shortlisting criteria covering product and module coverage, Indian banking references, integration experience with the bank's core platform and implementation track record, and issued the RFP to seven vendors, reviewing ten responses across standalone and integrated solution stacks.
Demonstrations and FTV Scoring – Over a two-week demonstration window, Cedar orchestrated scripted demos from origination, rules engine and platform implementation partners, with consensus scoring by a cross-functional panel at the end of each day, complemented by reference checks, five-year total cost of ownership comparisons and a review of multi-tenant cloud deployment against the national regulator's outsourcing and data localisation norms.
Way Forward Analysis – Cedar compared adopting a vendor-proposed stack with a best-of-breed combination of origination system and rules engine, and weighed product-based against platform-based solutions on flexibility, vendor dependency, scalability and the skills and process maturity each would demand of the bank.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The final report gave the steering committee a transparent, consensus-backed ranking of the shortlisted suppliers and a clear recommendation to pursue a best-of-breed approach, pairing a best-fit origination solution with a specialist decisioning engine to maximise functional depth and commercial leverage. Cedar recommended entering detailed contractual and commercial negotiations with the top-ranked suppliers and running a pre-implementation solution discovery with the preferred vendor, retaining a fallback option to reduce delivery risk and validate customisation needs before contract signature.
The agreed next steps move from steering committee approval through commercial negotiation, discovery and statement-of-work sign-off to implementation, giving the bank a defensible path to a single lending platform aligned with its digital lending ambitions.