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Building a Digital Bank
A new digital bank for small and medium-sized businesses, tasked Practicus with helping it build its technology platform.
Digital, technology and cyber
Practicus consultants led Project Management and performed other key roles within IT workstreams to build a digital platform for the launch. We configured a third-party core banking product to onboard customers making the platform match the bank’s requirements. We performed extensive business analysis, designing the ‘to be’ processes behind customer journey from data flows through an App and portal to the back-end set-up of a customer. Once we understood requirements, our consultants delivered digital technology solutions and supported third parties where appropriate to deliver. These included the integration layer, CRM, Finance, Treasury and Risk & Compliance Management.
Planning
Practicus consultants performed gap analysis between the ‘out of the box’ technology and the bank’s need to meet regulatory compliance considerations like Know Your Customer and Know Your Business. We wrote and owned the programme plan to achieve go live of the digital banking platform. We created the high-level plans for executives and the regulator as well as baselining the detailed planning for each workstream including test and release plans. We ensured that individual plans and associated risks and dependencies of thirteen different suppliers fed into the overall plan for go-live. We workshopped with each of the various workstreams and third-party vendors to fully understand risks and issues and tracked milestones throughout. We provided the programme board with weekly RAG status updates and reported weekly or monthly as appropriate on progress against plan to the executives. We led daily scrums to capture updates and communicate with the teams using a variety of tools including Slack, Confluence and Jira, deploying a mixture of waterfall and agile methods as required.
Risk, compliance and/or opportunity management
Risk and compliance were key aspects of this programme. Practicus consultants captured and documented the requirements for implementation of a Risk & Compliance Management system – key to demonstrating compliance around risk in order to gain licence approval from the regulator. Having captured requirements, we designed processes and worked with a specialist vendor to ensure the technical solution met the bank’s needs and data flows supported them. We also put in place a risk framework to manage risks and issues across the various workstreams. As owners of the Programme plan, our consultants ensured risks were identified, documented and raised in governance meetings.
Operational Planning
Practicus consultants built highly detailed operational plans that provided a clear picture of how various leaders and teams were tracking towards their contributions to the overall goal of launch readiness. For example, we tracked the build of all policies and procedures to gain regulatory approval. We reverse engineered back from the strategic outcome, mapped out and prioritised day-to-day tasks, incorporating them into an overall plan for operational readiness and ensured completion of them. We used MS Project, RAID logs and regularly reported progress in steering group meetings, troubleshooting risks and issues as and when they emerged throughout the programme.
