Cedar Podcasts

Banks need a future-proof digital core banking system to meet rising customer expectations, accelerate innovation, and respond quickly to market and regulatory changes. Traditional monolithic cores are rigid, costly, and unable to support true end-to-end digital transformation, even if modern apps and channels exist. Real transformation requires digitisation across the entire bank, anchored by a m...

Open Banking is a collaborative model that enables the secure sharing of customer-approved banking data through open APIs, fostering both collaboration and competition. This dual dynamic drives innovation, improves customer choice, and enhances financial experiences. FinTech's leverage open APIs to build user-friendly apps, deliver real-time insights, and create tailored solutions, while bank...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International Sustained profitability is difficult in the low-margin, highly competitive US restaurant industry, yet opportunities exist for suppliers with strong market insight. Tabletop products cutlery, dinnerware, drinkware and related items are essential to dining experiences but are often commoditized, with suppliers competing mainly on pri...

Islamic banking is growing rapidly, driven by wider availability, changing consumer preferences, and strong digital adoption. As digital transformation becomes a top priority, specialist Islamic FinTechs are increasingly critical to the sector’s evolution. While Islamic banks actively partner with FinTechs, many face challenges due to limited Shariah expertise among conventional FinTech providers...

In the digital era, banks must compete on experience, innovation, and engagement not just products or service levels. While digital usage is surging, branches remain relevant when reimagined as interactive, experience-led spaces. Successful banks differentiate through four key factors: engaging customers, demonstrating convenience, personalizing experiences, and managing operational risk effective...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming banking by reshaping processes across data management, lending, security, compliance, and customer engagement. AI, analytics and automation enable banks to process large data volumes, predict market trends, and improve decision-making. Key application areas include automated data collection and analysis, AI-driven credit and lending decisions, process a...

The real estate (RE) sector remains vital to economic and social development but is undergoing major transformation driven by technology, sustainability, shifting lifestyles, and post-pandemic work patterns. While office occupancy has declined in developed markets, demand for logistics, data centres and larger, wellness-oriented homes is rising. Despite a standardized six-stage RE lifecycle, the s...

Omnichannel banking aims to deliver a seamless, consistent customer experience across all channels, moving beyond transaction-focused multichannel models to experience-led engagement. With over 70% of customers using multiple channels, banks must prioritize transparency, relevance and personalization to drive loyalty and retention. Central to this is designing digital customer journeys around “mom...

Human capital is critical to business success, yet many Middle East organizations historically underinvested in HR due to reliance on transient expatriate labor and a focus on basic personnel administration. This has led to weak people development, low motivation and high attrition. As governments push nationalization and businesses recognize HR’s impact on performance, attention to structured HR...

Although digital transformation tops most banks’ agendas, only about half achieve success because digital banking is often treated as a technology project rather than a business transformation. Technology is an enabler; true success depends on customer engagement, experience and continuous innovation. Banks must dispel key myths: digital initiatives cannot be deferred, as rapid technological and c...

Building a successful digital bank goes far beyond launching mobile apps or marketing campaigns; it requires a customer-centric value proposition, strong internal capabilities and an organization-wide cultural shift. The digital journey begins by clearly defining “what’s in it for the customer,” ensuring technology, operating models and capabilities converge to deliver superior experiences. As ban...

Customer-driven competition is reshaping how suppliers compete, as customers now define performance criteria, evaluate suppliers systematically, and reduce reliance on traditional relationships. Driven by downsizing, technology, and consolidation, this model aims to cut costs and force suppliers to meet customer expectations in markets with fewer buyers and sellers. Global consolidation pushes cus...

Covid-19 and low interest rates have squeezed margins in corporate banking, accelerating a shift from interest income to fee-based Global Transaction Banking (GTB). GTB services—especially cash management, payments, collections and liquidity—are expected to contribute 60–70% of GTB revenues, representing a $1 trillion global opportunity. FinTech's are disrupting GTB through digital, blockchai...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International A study of small and mid-size U.S. banks shows a widening analytics gap versus large banks. While big banks invest heavily in enterprise BI, predictive analytics, and large teams of specialists, smaller banks remain constrained by Excel-based reporting or limited BI tools with narrow adoption and high costs. Even mid-sized banks str...

Organizations are increasingly using Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) to retain talent, reward performance, and align employee interests with long-term business success, especially in services-driven and GCC markets. ESOPs offer employees the right to buy shares at a predetermined price, motivating loyalty and performance without immediate cash outflows. A successful ESOP requires clear objecti...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International Successful bank mergers depend heavily on effective integration, with Human Capital Strategy providing a critical competitive advantage. Acquisitions often trigger anxiety, talent loss, productivity decline and cultural disruption. To mitigate these risks, banks must adopt a structured approach addressing people, leadership, culture...

Insurtech are firmly established and are reshaping the insurance industry, forcing incumbents to choose between competition and collaboration. Insurtech's add value through innovative product development (such as micro-duration and on-demand insurance), digital distribution and disintermediation, peer-to-peer models, and advanced technologies including analytics, AI and IoT across the insuran...

The COVID-19 crisis has forced organizations to rethink talent decisions, highlighting a critical question: what if employees stay but are not upskilled? Survival in a disrupted world depends on employees’ ability to adapt, making competency development essential rather than optional. Many organizations focus on outcomes instead of the foundational behaviors that drive them. A Competency Assessmen...

Core Banking Systems are critical to a bank’s competitiveness, and selecting the wrong platform can lead to major opportunity losses. Despite many vendors offering proven solutions, success depends on choosing a system that truly fits the bank’s business strategy and future needs. Based on extensive regional experience, Cedar outlines a structured, objective approach to selection. Key steps includ...

Banks often assess performance mainly through financial results, which are lag indicators and do not reflect long-term sustainability. A balanced scorecard for banks must therefore integrate financial and non-financial objectives across four perspectives: financial, customer, process, and learning and growth. An effective bank scorecard rests on four building blocks: creating a strategy map, defin...

Banks face five core IT challenges: making IT strategically relevant and customer-centric, improving returns on IT spend, enabling next-generation banking, aligning applications and infrastructure with enterprise vision, and building strong IT capabilities. However, IT strategy succeeds only through disciplined execution. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) provides a practical framework to translate IT...

Alternative and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending has matured into a permanent part of the financial ecosystem, with the market projected to exceed $70 billion. Growth has been strongest in SME lending, driven by digital players using advanced analytics, low-cost customer acquisition, simplified processes and AI-driven credit models. Regulatory burdens and compliance costs have further enabled non-banks...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International Organizations often fail to implement sound strategies because structures, tools and mindsets have not evolved with changing strategy demands. As value creation shifts from tangible assets to knowledge, relationships and capabilities, traditional financial controls and centralized command-and-control models prove inadequate. Executi...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for banks, severely impacting profitability, asset quality, liquidity, fee income and customer behavior across retail, SME, corporate and wealth segments. Falling interest rates, stressed sectors, rising NPAs, shrinking deposits and declining branch usage have disrupted trad...

Sanjiv Anand, Chairman, Cedar Management Consulting International Most organizations fail not because of poor strategy, but due to weak execution, with failure rates reaching 70–90% in India. Traditional management systems overly focus on budgets, often disconnecting daily actions from long-term strategy. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) addresses this gap by translating strategy into linked objective...