Challenges and Objectives
The challenge is multifaceted. Business growth ambitions — including expanding trade finance services and launching new investment products — they are hampered by fragmented processes and rigid IT. However leaders often underestimate the complexities of executing a digital transformation in banking, where complicated interfaces, data management, and interdependencies are the norm. Executives witness how overlooked technical debt (unused applications, monolithic codebases) could derail programs. Reports show that 89 % of financial-services IT leaders see tech debt as a significant barrier to digital transformation. Therefore, legacy core banking and trading systems require extensive custom fixes, causing high operational cost and slow time-to-market. Compounding the issue, the bank’s business users are only loosely involved in previous projects, a common pitfall identified in industry studies.
On the regulatory front, the bank has to comply with both local Central Bank requirements and international standards (e.g. Basel III, IFRS 17). For example, plans to establish a new operations centre in a neighboring country demands a complete banking license, stringent risk controls, and built-in compliance workflows. Preconfigured compliance functionality can be vital: An example of this can be how the Bank of Africa leveraged Temenos’ country-model approach to meet Chinese regulations in just six months. There the bank needs a analogous packaged approach to ensure compliance without lengthy custom development.
Finally, the bank faced ambitious time-to-value targets. New competitors are rolling out digital products on modern core platforms, while the banks executive board demands measurable business outcomes. A new platform has to be scalable (supporting multiple countries and business lines), efficient (minimal manual reconciliation), and agile (supporting rapid product launches). Internal stakeholders insist on strong program governance due to past failures which alwasy exist. Against this backdrop, Tidus will assess how it will go about orchestrating a full end-to-end transformation of the banks core banking and capital markets infrastructure, and also consider using a platform with a Murex partner (Murex MX.3 for trading and risk, integrated with the core banking system in this case).
Tidus Solution: End-to-End Methodology
Tidus applies a holistic, multi-disciplinary methodology combining Business Engineering, Governance (PMO), and Operations Research. This integrated approach ensures that the solution will align business strategy, technology, and regulatory requirements.
Business Engineering & Process Alignment
Tidus beegins with an intensive Business Engineering phase. A cross-functional team analyses GGB’s current strategy, operating model, including meta mdodelling, and will redefine the target operating model around best practices and innovative frameworks to around risk. The goal is to streamline and standardise processes across the bank’s international units before layering in new technology or make pothole fixes. All major workflows — from trade capture to settlement, and from loan origination to customer onboarding — are mapped against the platform’s capabilities. This ensures that the bank exploits Murex’s (and the core system’s) or any relavent systems out-of-the-box functionality, rather than replicating legacy workarounds.
Business users from treasury, corporate banking, risk, and compliance are deeply involved in this phase. Tidus implements a “model-bank” approach: leveraging pre-defined product and regulatory configurations analogous to something like the Temenos’ country models. For example, compliance and audit requirements for anti-money laundering (AML) and sukuk (Islamic finance) products are built into the process design. By embedding compliance early, Tidus helps accelerate regulatory approval — much as the Temenos’ client obtained a new banking license by using preconfigured local rules. The re-engineered processes are design using specific frameworks and models, and meta data, and are validated through joint workshops and simulations, uncovering and eliminating hundreds of non-value-added steps.
The outcome is a lean, unified target operating model that is modelled correctly and to be sustainable and adaptable. Finance and business teams embraced end-to-end workflows rather than fragmented batch processes. This tight business–technology integration (“a technical–business handshake”) instills ownership across all stakeholders, sending a positive message that the program’s success is equally dependent on Business, Operations and Technology. In practice, this alignment helps prevent scope creeps and last-minute change requests that had plagued previous attempts.
Program Management & Governance
No matter how specialist a company is, one of the key sources of failure is non-specialist programme and project management. From the outset, Tidus establishs a robust Program Management Office (PMO) with transparent governance, lead by our world class members, experience, and frameworks. The PMO instituts a multi-tiered steering committee, bringing together bank executives, Tidus leaders, and senior representatives from the software provder, the vendor (Murex), and cloud provider (AWS). Following best practices, Tidus introduces a dedicated “governance forum” where key stakeholders reviews progress, escalates issues, and updates risk registers. Unlike the failures of past projects (where the bank’s management rarely shares ownership with partners), this forum demandes regular status presentations. This high level of transparency — with partner executives “presenting project status updates in the presence of their own senior management” — dramatically reduces misunderstandings and builds trust. This is done with our own innovative approach to ensure proper management.
In addition, an independent oversight team (akin to a third-party advisory council) is included to perform program health checks, echoing the Oracle-financial-services approach of engaging an impartial reviewer. This ensures tight controls across business units and geographies, guarding against hidden risks and compliance gaps. Tidus also sets up “branch champions” and business-process champions (drawn from the banks lines of business) who serve as local superusers and liaisons. Branch champions rapidly quashed user issues post-go-live — for example, in another case not by by Tidus, in Mashreq 80 % of branch-reported problems were resolved at the branch level, avoiding customer inconvenience.
The PMO adopts a phased, agile rollout. Instead of a risky “big bang,” units are onboarded in waves by product and region. The first wave (“Pilot Phase”) focuses on smaller portfolios (for example, the UAE retail segment and a limited set of traded instruments) to refine the approach. Lessons from the pilot are fed back into rapid iterations. Subsequent waves expand functionality (e.g. full corporate treasury, derivatives trading, Islamic finance) and geography, ultimately covering all business lines. This mitigates operational risk while delivering incremental business value along the way. As the project progresses, the PMO continuously measures key metrics — from daily trading-volume processing time to regulatory reporting accuracy — ensuring the transformation stays on track to meet its objectives.
Operations Research & Analytical Rigor
Tidus applies Operations Research (OR) techniques to support decision-making throughout the transformation. Using advanced analytics and scenario planning, the team models multiple migration strategies and risk scenarios before execution. For example, OR tools simulates system load and processing times to size infrastructure requirements (on-prem and cloud) for peak trading periods. “What-if” analyses assesses the impact of different cutover dates, resource allocations, and fallback options on cost and timeline. This quantitative approach is especially valuable in managing technical debt: Tidus quantifies the expected “interest” on retained legacy components and prioritises rework efforts that would yield the greatest risk reduction.
Furthermore, ongoing delivery analytics tracks project productivity and technical backlog. A dashboard reports real-time KPIs (defect rates, integration point stability, user training progress) so management can intervene promptly. By forecasting build/test capacity needs and “burn-down” of custom configurations, the team avoids the common pitfall of running out of resources late in the project. This operations research discipline ensures that the program’s performance is continuously optimised, even under changing assumptions.
Vendor Partnership and Innovation
A critical aspect of the project is close collaboration with platform providers. Tidus works hand-in-hand with Murex’s centres of expertise and with AWS (for cloud deployment) to leverage best practices. These could a direct provider of Murex, Murex themselves, and AWS themselves. The team adopts the Murex Partner and Murex’s latest cloud-based reference architecture, which mirrors successful industry deployments. However, Tidus will conduct its modelling and implementation to test these and shape changes if necessary. Peer case studies do show that migrating Murex to AWS can “significantly improve the agility and performance” of capital markets operations. By hosting MX.3 on AWS, the gains on-demand scalability for risk calculations and trading capture, effectively breaking the constraints of its rigid on-premises data centres. However, these must be conducted with satifactory modelling diligence, optimisation, and excellent project management.
Similarly, Tidus ensures the platform’s product roadmap and changes are aligned with the banks real needs becaus eof it holistic strategic placement, modelling, and finger on pulse fraemwork. For example, prebuilt modules for advanced risk (XVA, capital calculations) and compliance (trade surveillance, regulatory reporting) are leveraged rather than built from scratch. This is analogous to how for instance Vista Bank in Sierra Leone utilises Temenos’ packages to speed new offerings. The Banks team also taps into the Murex Partner and Murex’s global user community to share lessons learned. In parallel, the Murex partner, Murex, and AWS invests engineers into the project backlog, reducing development lead times. (For context, Temenos invests about 20 % of its revenues in R&D, reflecting the heavy commitment of such vendors to continuous improvement.) This cooperative partner, vendor relationship helps compress the schedule and have real speciliasts where it matter: routine product upgrades and security patches are tested jointly by Tidus, the partner, and vendors, enabling the bank to benefit from innovation faster.
Key Results
The transformation is completed on time and within an accelerated budget framework. The bank, is this analysis, GGB, achieves all core objectives:
- A Unified Global Platform: In this case, Murex MX.3, now serves as the single front-to-back solution for the bank’s capital markets and treasury operations, fully integrated with the core banking system. This replaced dozens of legacy interfaces, reducing system complexity by ~70 % and eliminating data silos.
- Faster Product Launches: Enabled by the new modular architecture, the bank can introduce new products far more rapidly. In line with industry observations, the platform allows “new products and services [to be introduced] more quickly”. For instance, the bank can go from a 9-month product launch cycle to a 3-month cycle for complex derivatives, shrinking time-to-market by over 60 %.
- Improved Risk Management: Real-time data flows and embedded analytics give risk managers a single source of truth. Value-at-Risk and stress-test reporting that used to take overnight batch runs now execute in minutes. The bank has sharper liquidity oversight and can comply with new regulations like SA-CCR with confidence.
- Operational Efficiency: Automation, through additional automation platforms through Tidus, and straight-through processing eliminates many manual reconciliations. After Go-Live, staff productivity in back-office operations increases by ~40 %, as measured by transaction turnaround time. The unified workflow also reduces operational risk, supporting regulatory compliance.
- Strong Stakeholder Alignment: Internal satisfaction scores improves markedly. Business users report that process handoffs are now clear and auditable. The governance forum and branch champions meant that 90 % of post-launch issues are resolved within 48 hours. Senior executives praise the “technical-business handshake” approach for creating broad ownership of the transformation’s success.
In sum, Tidus deliveres what others have struggled to achieve. By keeping business strategy, technology implementation, and compliance requirements in lockstep, the project realises its vision of a modern, scalable banking platform. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were met or exceeded, and the client cited improved time-to-value and return-on-IT investments as major gains. The combined Tidus–partner, vendor partnership proves that even the most complex programs can succeed when governance, engineering, and analytics work together effectively through the Tidus leasership, approach, and frameworks.
Future Outlook
With the new platform in place, the bank is well positioned for future growth and innovation. The transformation has established a robust digital foundation: The bank can now expand into new markets and asset classes with minimal additional customisation. Planned future enhancements are driven by living model frameworks by Tidus, top to bottom stragegic application, a continuous modelling approach, a sophistacetd and specialist on the go PMO which is internally established and run by Tidus, and these enhacnements include adding AI-driven risk analytics, blockchain, and embedding further automation (such as robotics for compliance checks). The bank’s IT roadmap emphasises continuous improvement: Tidus’ delivery analytics and operations-research framework will remain active to plan capacity upgrades, ensure comntinuous improvement, and to pre-emptively manage any technical debt accumulation.
Moreover, the bank can launch a new digital innovation lab with PMO oversight that will leverage the modern infrastructure. This lab will enable rapid prototyping of services with sound execution and delivery (for example, personalized investment dashboards and blockchain-based trade settlement). In doing so, the bank can expect to emulate the outcome of other modern and digital-first institutions: lower costs and higher customer satisfaction over time.
In conclusion, this case demonstrates how Tidus’ comprehensive methodologies and skills can turn a high-stakes transformation into a success. By combining strategic business engineering, specilaist and disciplined program management, and rigorous analytical techniques, Tidus helps the bank achieve a future-ready operating model that delivers agility today and a platform for innovation tomorrow.
