Client Background
The client is a leading bank in Saudi Arabia with a clear ambition to expand its trade finance business, and it was revisiting improvements across people, process and technology to get there. Its trade back office and corporate trade portal ran on a platform that had been heavily customised at the product layer over several years, with an undocumented integration layer that had only recently been replaced and an implementation partner that had exited without a structured handover. The result was a steady stream of reconciliation breaks, manual SWIFT handling, limit and commission issues and long resolution cycles, alongside paper-based initiation and email approvals that no longer matched the bank's strategic vision. Cedar was mandated to conduct an unbiased assessment of the trade finance platforms and to recommend whether the bank should retain, upgrade or replace them.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied a structured, evidence-led assessment that examined the platform through four lenses (system, people and process, supplier and the external market) before converting the findings into an options evaluation. The work progressed through five modules:
Discovery and Stakeholder Conversations – Over four weeks Cedar held more than 14 discussions across trade business, operations, credit administration, compliance, digital and IT teams, complemented by platform walkthroughs and a review of the trade strategy, defect logs, internal audit observations, the vendor contract and a year of transaction volumes.
Issue Classification – Every business input was classified as a core platform, integration, non-system or functionality-enhancement issue and rated for severity against customer, regulatory and financial impact. This separated genuine product limitations from problems caused by implementation choices and customisation, and showed that most pain points belonged to the latter.
Internal Assessment – Cedar assessed the platform, its implementation and integrations, trade operations, regulatory and compliance controls, vendor contract and support, and process innovation. Key gaps included the absence of workflow and robotic automation, manual limit handling, and no systematic checks for dual-use goods or over- and under-invoicing.
External Market Assessment – The incumbent platform was benchmarked against four leading trade finance solutions on functional, technical and vendor criteria, including Shariah-compliant product coverage, inbuilt workflow, SWIFT compliance, local market fit, API depth, architecture, cloud readiness and regional support. A scan of the platforms used by large banks across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman added peer context.
Options Evaluation – Cedar compared rearchitecting the incumbent platform with replacing it with a specialist front-to-back solution across eight decision criteria, including functionality, integration and implementation complexity, timeline, commercial impact and vendor support, and set design principles that would apply whichever option was chosen.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
Cedar established that the status quo was not an option and that a simple version upgrade would not work, because the undocumented product-layer customisations could not be carried forward safely. The recommended way forward was to rearchitect and reimplement the latest version of the incumbent back-office platform and customer portal, delivered by the vendor with minimal customisation and independent programme governance. This path retained a functionally rich, modular platform, protected the bank's recent integration investment and offered a materially shorter and less disruptive route than full replacement. Cedar also advised the bank to use competitive bids from the market to negotiate favourable terms and to secure dedicated vendor support with agreed service levels.
The agreed roadmap sequences discovery, build, testing, data migration rehearsals and business simulation for the core platform, while an ecosystem track introduces supply chain finance, intelligent document processing, a trade-based money laundering platform, workflow-driven approvals, relationship-based pricing, single sign-on across cash and trade portals and consolidated reporting. A parallel people and process track covers user training, SOP documentation and structured governance from the start of the new programme.