Boston Consulting Group · 2023–24
Core banking Loan Management System
A major regional Philippine bank needed to modernise the core lending system used daily by ~1,000 employees — inside a complex, multi-vendor environment. Monica owned the design, build, and testing of the delivery end-to-end, and the system launched roughly 12 months ahead of the industry norm.
It all started when
The bank ran its lending on an ageing core system that ~1,000 employees relied on every day. Modernising it meant coordinating a delivery triangle — the bank, Temenos as the SaaS platform provider, and Cognizant as the system integrator — while keeping a live business running throughout.
What Monica built and ran
Monica owned delivery end-to-end — requirements, backlog, build, and testing — across the bank / Temenos / Cognizant triangle.
- Ran requirement-gathering workshops across every loan capability — Customer Registration, Loan Booking, Loan Servicing, Restructuring/Closure, Static Data Config, and Finance & Accounting — each with its own senior stakeholder (Head of Home Loans, CFO, and others).
- Scoped the product around Home Loans — roughly 125K individual loans with limit-setup requirements.
- Translated 22 business requirement documents into 240 user stories (each with "As a / I need / so that", acceptance criteria, and story points), and owned the product backlog end-to-end.
- Owned the design, build, and testing phases of the SDLC end-to-end via a waterfall model (chosen for the bank's resource constraints) — including quality control on design documents to gate build readiness, and project-managing build completion plus the SIT and UAT phases.
- Managed integration across 35 systems, working through legacy/new-core compatibility, decommission timelines, and overall architecture.
- Established SLAs with Temenos for bug resolution on Transact.
- Fed contracting: contract value was scoped directly off the defined user stories, because only at that point was the out-of-the-box vs. custom-build split clear.
- Managed a cross-vendor team of 14 developers and 6 testers from Cognizant.
- Built and applied a change-prioritisation framework — balancing the cost of each change against its time impact to decide what to absorb versus defer while protecting the go-live date and budget.
Key Stakeholders collaborated with
- Weekly meetings with the CFO to report on programme progress, using detailed progress charts as the core reporting artefact.
- A close day-to-day working relationship with a direct report of the client's C-suite as the key counterpart.
Impact
- Launched 12 months ahead of industry norms.
- 2–3× faster time-to-launch for new products going forward.
- 60%+ reduction in system complexity (fewer entities built on top of the core for API exposure).
- Nanosecond-latency core, with a max 3-second response for complex interactions.
Major Takeaways
- Delivering across a bank + SaaS vendor + system integrator triangle is constant negotiation — timelines, scope, and accountability get renegotiated in real time as delays surface.
- Legacy-to-new-core migrations hide domain complexity (data formats, market-specific regulation) that only surfaces once requirements-gathering is well underway.
- User stories were the mechanism that made the out-of-the-box vs. custom split visible early enough to price the contract accurately.
- Long waterfall cycles live or die on consistent, structured senior-stakeholder reporting to hold confidence.