Core Banking Cloud Readiness Director — Consulting

The mandate

The narrowly defined problem is whether the bank's core estate is technically, operationally and regulatorily ready for progressive cloud migration. Current vendor narratives omit ledger dependencies, recovery design and the cost of prolonged coexistence.

The engagement produces an independent readiness opinion, dependency map, control-gap register, migration-wave options, five-year cost envelope and board decision paper. Procurement execution and migration delivery remain outside scope.

By 30 September 2026, milestone one delivers the verified estate and dependency baseline; by 15 November, milestone two delivers workload disposition, control gaps and three migration options; by 31 December, milestone three delivers the costed recommendation and board paper.

The CIO, COO and Chief Risk Officer accept the work only if all tier-one dependencies have accountable owners, recovery objectives are tested against designs, costs reconcile to finance within five percent, and each option has explicit stop conditions.

The client supplies architecture repositories, incident and resilience records, current contracts, workload telemetry, cost data and access to twelve named domain owners. A client programme manager coordinates evidence and resolves access within two working days.

Why this is external work

Architecture teams designed the current estate and procurement is preparing a vendor process, so neither is positioned to issue an independent opinion. Specialist migration judgement is needed for one finite decision window. The external team also gives risk and operations a common evidence base.

What you will own

• Verify application, data, integration and operational dependencies for the milestone-one estate baseline.
• Reconcile business criticality with actual recovery objectives, failure modes and batch constraints.
• Classify workloads as retain, remediate, replatform, replace or retire for milestone two.
• Quantify identity, encryption, observability, resilience and exit-control gaps.
• Design three sequenced migration options with decision gates and rollback boundaries.
• Build the five-year cost envelope, including dual run, egress, licences and internal change.
• Deliver and defend the milestone-three recommendation before the Core Transformation Committee.

Candidate qualifications

• 22–28 years in banking architecture, core platforms, cloud or technology transformation.
• Direct delivery of at least one regulated core-platform readiness or migration assessment.
• Deep knowledge of ledgers, payments, batch, recovery, data residency and cloud control models.
• Experience building total-cost cases that include coexistence and exit economics.
• Evidence of obtaining joint CIO, COO and risk sign-off on migration gates.
• Independence from vendors expected to enter the subsequent procurement.

Non-negotiables

• No implementation bid or cloud-reseller revenue connected to the recommendation.
• Onsite Mumbai workshops during baseline, option and final acceptance weeks.
• Finance-reconciled calculations and traceable evidence for every tier-one conclusion.
• Full disclosure of relationships with prospective platform, cloud and integration bidders.

1. 49 words maximum. Which core-banking cloud-readiness opinion did you deliver, and what finding changed the migration path?
2. 49 words maximum. How will you verify hidden batch and recovery dependencies before 30 September?
3. 49 words maximum. Which vendor relationships must be excluded or disclosed to preserve an independent opinion?