A forty-year-old bank learns to move at the speed of morning.
Event-driven core around a legacy mainframe — real-time positions, 26-minute onboarding, releases in under an hour.
Client
Meridian Private Bank
Timeline
9 months
Craft
Product Engineering
Platform & Cloud
What needed to change
Meridian manages CHF 31 billion for clients who expect answers in real time. Their core banking system was built in 1986 and thought in overnight batches: positions were yesterday's truth, onboarding a new client took nine days of couriered paper, and a software release was a quarterly event with a war room attached.
Replacing the core outright was a five-year gamble the board had already rejected twice. The brief we accepted was harder and better: make the bank feel brand new without touching the thing that must not break.
What we made together
MOVE 01
Strangle, don't smash
We wrapped the mainframe in an event-driven layer — every core mutation published to Kafka within 300 ms, giving the rest of the bank a live nervous system while the legacy core kept its job.
MOVE 02
Onboarding as a product
Digital KYC, document intelligence and straight-through provisioning collapsed nine days of paper into one guided session. Compliance signed off because the audit trail got better, not looser.
MOVE 03
Two apps, one truth
A new advisor workspace and client app read from the same event streams — the relationship manager and the client finally look at the same number at the same second.
MOVE 04
Deploys as non-events
Trunk-based delivery, progressive rollouts and automated compliance evidence turned the quarterly war room into a 41-minute pipeline nobody watches.
What moved in daylight
DAYBREAK went live without a single minute of client-facing downtime. The bank now onboards a client before their espresso goes cold, ships improvements weekly, and the board that rejected two core replacements approved funding for phase three in one meeting.
26 min
client onboarding
from 9 days
41 min
release cycle
from 6 weeks
99.995%
uptime since launch
14 months and counting
−71%
advisor prep time
per client meeting
“They shipped in nine months what our previous partner couldn't even scope in nine. And they hit the date they named in week two.”
R. KellerHead of Digital, Meridian Private Bank
NEXT WORK
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