A Technology Assessment That Cancelled a 1.8M JOD Project

Jordan Commercial Finance had approved a budget of approximately 1.8 million JOD to replace their core banking platform. The board had signed off, a vendor had been shortlisted, and implementation was scheduled to begin the following quarter.

One board member asked for an independent second opinion before contracts were signed. We were engaged for a six-week assessment with a deliberately narrow brief: establish whether the replacement was necessary, and if so whether the shortlisted approach was right.

The stated justification for replacement was that the existing system could not support mobile banking, was too slow at month-end, and presented an unacceptable security risk. All three claims came from the same source: a vendor presentation.

This IT consulting Jordan sets out the brief, the approach and the measured result.

This IT consulting engagement in Jordan was scoped to answer one question: was a 1.8 million dinar core banking replacement actually necessary?

We assessed each claim independently rather than accepting the framing, and measured rather than inferred wherever possible.

Claim one: the system cannot support mobile banking

This proved to be false. The core held a documented, functioning API layer that had never been exposed beyond internal use. What the bank lacked was not a capable core — it was a mobile application and the integration work to connect the two.

We built a working proof of concept against the existing API in nine days, which settled the argument more decisively than any document could.

Claim two: unacceptable month-end performance

We profiled the actual workload. Month-end slowness traced to four unindexed queries in a reporting module, not to architectural limits. Adding the indexes reduced the longest-running report from 47 minutes to under 3.

This is the kind of finding that a vendor proposing a replacement has no incentive to look for.

Claim three: unacceptable security risk

Here the concern was partly justified, but not in the way presented. The core itself was patched and reasonably configured. The genuine exposure was in three peripheral systems with shared administrative credentials and no audit logging, plus an unencrypted nightly file transfer to a reporting server.

Replacing the core would not have fixed any of those. They would have been carried straight into the new environment.

What we recommended instead

• Build the mobile application against the existing core API.
• Fix the reporting indexes and add query monitoring.
• Remediate the three peripheral systems and encrypt the transfer.
• Modernise the customer-facing layer while leaving the ledger alone.
• Reassess the core in three years against evidence rather than a sales deck.

Total cost of the recommended programme: approximately 340,000 JOD, delivered across eleven months. We also documented the conditions that would genuinely justify replacement later, so the decision could be revisited on merit.