How we helped a mid-tier regional bank make a defensible $40M core platform decision without losing institutional knowledge along the way.
The client operated a core banking platform that had been in production for more than twenty years. The system had grown incrementally through mergers and product extensions, and the underlying technology was no longer supported by the original vendor. A significant regulatory uplift — including updated CPS 230 operational risk requirements — had sharpened the board's awareness that continued investment in extensions was no longer commercially or technically defensible.
What complicated matters was that the bank was not in crisis. The platform worked. The problem was that it could not move at the speed the business needed. New product launches were taking nine to twelve months. Straight-through processing of branches had stalled at 62%. Cost-to-income ratios in retail banking were drifting upward. The CFO had been told by three different consulting firms that a replacement was necessary, but the board was not prepared to sign a cheque of this size on the strength of a vendor pitch deck.
We were engaged by the chair of the technology committee on a fixed-fee basis to do one thing: produce a defensible, independent business case for the board, including a vendor shortlist and a target operating model that the executive could actually execute against. We were explicitly not engaged to sell a particular platform.
We started with discovery rather than evaluation. Over the first six weeks we ran structured interviews with seventeen executives across retail, commercial, risk, finance, operations and technology, and we walked the floor with branch staff in three locations to understand the actual experience of the existing system, not the experience as described in process documentation.
We then rebuilt the cost-of-change model from the bank's own general ledger, working alongside the finance team to make sure every line item could be defended in front of the CFO. We refused to use vendor-supplied TCO templates because in our experience they almost always understate implementation cost and overstate run-rate savings.
From there, we mapped capability gaps against six shortlisted core platforms — three established global vendors and three modern cloud-native providers. Each was assessed against a published 124-point capability matrix that the executive team had signed off before we began, so no vendor could later claim the deck was rigged.
For the first time in this bank's history, the board was given a vendor decision that did not arrive with a sales team attached. The result was slower — and substantially better. — Chair, Technology Committee
We required every vendor to demonstrate their platform against a scripted set of Australian banking scenarios — same-day lending decisions, hardship processing under the Banking Code of Practice, NPS-aligned complaints handling — rather than their preferred reference stories. Two vendors were eliminated on technical capability; one was eliminated on commercial terms.
Equally important was the target operating model. A new core platform without a redesigned operating model around it delivers about a third of the value the vendor's pitch deck promises. We worked with the COO to define what the bank would look like in steady state: which decisions would be automated, which would remain human, where the seams between channels needed to be redesigned, and how the technology operating model would have to change. This became the operating manual for the transformation programme.
Twelve months after the engagement began, the board signed off on a replacement platform with a five-year business case showing a projected 18% reduction in cost-to-serve and a payback period of just under four years. APRA was briefed throughout and had no objections to the prudential implications. The programme is now in delivery; we are retained for quarterly assurance reviews.
The hardest part of this engagement was not the vendor evaluation. It was convincing the executive team that a slower, more rigorous process would be more defensible than a faster one. Boards sign off on transformation programmes because they trust the evidence. The job of independent advisory is to make that evidence trustworthy — even when it makes the timeline longer.
For organisations considering a similar decision, the most useful starting point is not the vendor shortlist. It is a clear-eyed view of the cost of doing nothing for another three years. Once that number is on the table, the rest of the conversation becomes much easier.
If your organisation is approaching a core platform decision and would value an independent view before vendor engagement begins, we would be glad to talk. Early conversations are confidential and carry no obligation.