Industries

Regulatory delivery consumes the capacity that modernisation needed.

In most banks mandatory work dominates the change portfolio, and the modernisation that would make it cheaper never reaches the top. MENTARA works that trade.

Discuss a financial services priority Read the detail

More in Industries

The sector's actual constraint

Financial services organisations rarely lack a modernisation plan. What they lack is uncommitted delivery capacity, because regulatory and mandatory change arrives on external deadlines and takes priority over everything discretionary — every year, indefinitely.

The compounding effect is the real problem. Each mandatory programme is delivered against the existing estate, usually by extending it, which makes the estate more complex and the next mandatory programme more expensive. Capacity available for structural improvement shrinks each cycle.

The failure mode

Change freeze as a permanent operating condition.

Risk controls in banking are designed to make change safe, and over time they frequently make it rare instead. Release windows narrow, approval chains lengthen, and the practical cost of shipping anything rises until teams batch changes into large infrequent releases — which are precisely the releases most likely to fail, confirming the belief that change is dangerous.

The second pattern is that core systems become undocumented dependencies. Mainframe and legacy core platforms still process the transactions, the people who understood them have retired, and the organisational response is to wrap rather than replace. Each wrapper is reasonable and the accumulated layer makes the core harder to reason about than it was.

The third is data lineage. Regulatory reporting requires demonstrating where a number came from, and in estates assembled over decades that provenance is frequently reconstructed manually each cycle. It is expensive, it does not compound, and it is the work most amenable to being fixed properly once.

Priorities

Where the work usually sits.

01Core modernisation sequencingWhether incremental decomposition of a core platform is viable, where the seams are, and a sequence that survives a change of sponsor.

02Regulatory data and lineageReporting provenance built once and reused, rather than reconstructed each cycle by the same people under the same time pressure.

03Payments and real-time capabilityMoving from batch-shaped architecture to real-time processing, including the operational and reconciliation implications that usually surface late.

04Financial crime and fraud systemsDetection tuning and case management where alert volume exceeds investigation capacity — a triage design problem more than a modelling one.

05Resilience and operational continuityRecovery positions that have been tested rather than documented, against regulatory expectations that increasingly require evidence.

06Delivery pace inside risk controlsMaking change safe and frequent rather than safe and rare — pipeline controls, automated evidence and release practice that satisfies control objectives without batching.

Questions

What buyers ask.

Can you work within our regulatory and outsourcing obligations?

Supplier obligations in this sector are substantial — outsourcing notification, concentration risk, audit rights, exit planning and operational resilience requirements vary by regulator and by jurisdiction.

We would rather work through those requirements honestly in scoping, including where our size or our lack of security certification makes a particular arrangement unworkable, than discover it at contracting. Our full security position is on the trust and security page.

Do you have a core banking platform you implement?

No, and we take no vendor commission on any platform. That means our view on whether to modernise, replace or wrap a core system carries no commercial interest — which is unusual in this sector and is worth something during a selection exercise.

Where MENTARA fits best.

Scope

We fit assessment, sequencing, data lineage, delivery-pace diagnosis and independent assurance — the parts where the constraint is judgement rather than certified scale.

A multi-year core banking replacement, or a regulatory programme needing dozens of staff against a fixed external deadline, is better served by a partner with an established bench and regulatory standing.

MENTARA was incorporated in July 2026 and has no published client work in this or any sector, so the quality of the thinking on this page — and in a first conversation — is what there is to judge us on.

Where this connects

Services

Workforce model

Contract Staffing