A 30-day assessment should not pretend to select a core, produce final architecture, or estimate an entire conversion. Its purpose is to make the bank's current state and decision gaps visible, test whether leaders agree on the outcomes, and define the next set of evidence needed for a responsible path.
Week 1: Establish objectives and facts
Confirm executive sponsorship, decision owners, business outcomes, customer and employee pain points, growth priorities, risk constraints, timing drivers, prior commitments, and measures. Build an inventory of products, core modules, channels, critical interfaces, vendor contracts, major changes underway, and known issues.
Week 2: Map architecture, data, and integration
Platform and capabilities
Identify which product, pricing, account, transaction, payment, customer, servicing, reporting, and control capabilities live in each platform.
Integration and dependencies
Map batch, file, message, API, event, manual, and vendor connections with ownership, latency, failures, reconciliation, and change difficulty.
Data and reporting
Document sources of truth, identifiers, quality, history, lineage, calculations, access, regulatory reporting, analytics, and conversion complexity.
Security and resilience
Assess identity, privilege, logging, vulnerabilities, recovery dependencies, operational workarounds, incidents, and testing evidence.
Week 3: Assess operating and control readiness
Map the people, procedures, approvals, exceptions, reconciliations, customer communications, service levels, complaints, training, model and data controls, vendor oversight, testing, issue management, and evidence that a change would affect. Identify limited capacity, concentrated knowledge, competing programs, and roles the target model will require.
Week 4: Compare pathways and sequence decisions
Evaluate credible pathways such as optimize, wrap, componentize, coexist, or replace. Compare them against outcome coverage, time, risk, dependency, cost range, operating change, vendor constraints, architecture, data, control impact, and reversibility. Do not collapse uncertainty into a single score; state assumptions and evidence gaps.
Minimum outputs
- An agreed outcome and decision framework with accountable sponsors.
- A current-state capability, platform, integration, data, control, and vendor map.
- A prioritized risk and dependency register with evidence owners.
- Two or more credible modernization pathways and the conditions under which each fits.
- A 90-day action plan for deeper analysis, remediation, market engagement, or a bounded first release.
Readiness is a decision quality, not a maturity score
A bank is ready to proceed when it understands what problem it is solving, who owns the decisions, which facts are reliable, where uncertainty remains, what operating change is required, and how the next commitment can be measured and reversed if assumptions prove wrong.
