National Bank Modernizes Core Banking Platform
The Challenge
A major Canadian bank was operating on a 20-year-old monolithic core banking system that limited their ability to launch new digital products and meet evolving regulatory requirements. The system processed over 2 million transactions daily, making any migration extremely high-risk. Integration with modern fintech partners was nearly impossible, and the bank was losing competitive ground to digital-first challengers.
The Solution
Zaha Technologies designed and executed a phased migration strategy using a strangler fig pattern to incrementally replace legacy components with cloud-native microservices on AWS. We implemented an API gateway layer that allowed the bank to maintain legacy system operations while progressively routing traffic to new services. The migration included a modern event-driven architecture using Apache Kafka for real-time transaction processing, containerized services on Amazon EKS, and infrastructure as code using Terraform. Our team worked closely with the bank's compliance team to ensure all OSFI guidelines and data residency requirements were met throughout the migration, with data remaining within Canadian data centres.
The Results
“Zaha's phased approach gave us confidence that we could modernize without risking our core operations. The results speak for themselves — faster processing, lower costs, and the agility to compete with digital-first banks.”— Chief Information Officer, Leading Canadian Bank
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