Client
A FTSE-100 retail and commercial bank
Sector
Financial Services
Engagement
Strategy, delivery and embedded engineering - multi-quarter programme.
The challenge
What the client needed
The client was running a high-volume sterling and euro payments platform on an ageing on-premise estate. Capacity was constrained, change cycles were measured in months, and regulatory expectations under the PRA’s operational resilience framework were tightening. A previous attempt to lift the platform into the cloud had stalled after nine months due to architectural and security concerns.
Our approach
How we worked
- Spent four weeks discovering the real architecture - including undocumented batch dependencies and overnight reconciliation jobs - and produced a single, agreed system-of-record diagram for the first time in years.
- Designed a regulator-aligned landing zone with the bank’s security and compliance functions, with explicit controls mapped to PRA SS1/21, FCA SYSC 8, and the Bank of England’s critical third-party expectations.
- Built a strangler-pattern migration plan that moved low-risk batch workloads first, then progressively shifted real-time payment flows behind feature flags with continuous reconciliation against the legacy system.
- Embedded a small senior squad alongside the bank’s payments engineers, with explicit knowledge-transfer milestones and joint on-call from week six.
- Ran four formal game days against the new platform - including a full-region failure scenario - before the first production cutover.
Outcomes
Measured results
All figures verified with the client. Specific identifiers withheld in line with our standard confidentiality terms.
- 100% of in-scope payment volumes migrated with zero missed cut-offs and zero customer-impacting incidents during the cutover window.
- Average change lead time for the payments platform reduced from 11 weeks to 4 days.
- Annual run cost reduced by 38% versus the previous on-premise baseline, after factoring in cloud, licensing and decommissioning savings.
- Three subsequent regulatory inspections completed with no significant findings on the migrated estate.
- Internal payments engineering team grew their cloud and SRE capability through 9 months of paired delivery.
“Halfteck were the first partner who told us honestly what wasn’t going to work and why. The way they paired with our engineers meant the capability stayed in the bank long after they had moved on.”
Working on something similar?
If this engagement looks like the kind of problem you are facing, we would be glad to compare notes by email.