Challenge
The bank's credit operations had grown organically over fifteen years across four parallel spreadsheets, two in-house decisioning tools and an aging core platform. Front-office RMs were waiting up to nine working days for a Lombard credit decision; credit officers were reconciling exposure manually across systems that did not agree. A FINMA pre-visit review flagged the audit trail as a structural risk, with three letter-of-comfort recommendations.
How we delivered
Phase 1 — Discovery and shadow run: SpeciTec deployed a sandbox of SpeciCRED loaded with twelve months of historic loan files. The bank's credit team ran their working day in parallel for six weeks, reconciling outputs and flagging policy gaps before any production cutover.
Phase 2 — Migration and integration: live data migrated from the two in-house systems with byte-for-byte reconciliation. SpeciCRED was wired into the bank's existing core, custody feed (SIX SIS), market data (Bloomberg) and AML/KYC stack via standard connectors.
Phase 3 — Go-live and stabilisation: a single weekend cutover, with the SpeciTec team on-site. The four legacy spreadsheets and one of the two in-house systems were retired in week one; the second was decommissioned in month three after parallel-run sign-off from internal audit.
Outcome
Within six months, median time-to-decision on Lombard credit files dropped from nine working days to under 48 hours. Credit officer productivity rose 42% on a constant-headcount basis. The next FINMA visit — six weeks after go-live — closed without findings on credit operations and the regulator specifically commended the new audit trail.
“We rebuilt our credit engine without rebuilding our credit team. SpeciCRED took the friction out of the workflow without forcing us to retrain twenty years of institutional judgement.”
