Buenos Aires, Argentina
Core migrations do not fail on the new platform.
Six core banking platforms selected, implemented, migrated or decoupled across four countries.
The problem
Core migrations do not fail on the new platform. They fail at the moment the old one has to be switched off — the phase where both systems run at once, the cost doubles, and every exception the business forgot about surfaces at the same time.
That phase is systematically underestimated, and usually by design: nobody wants to put a realistic coexistence period in the paper that goes to the board, because it makes the business case worse. So the plan assumes a clean cutover, and the programme spends its second year discovering why that was never possible.
What I have worked with
Six core platforms selected, implemented, migrated or decoupled: Mambu, Bantotal, Temenos, TOPAZ, Sicoob and a proprietary AS/400 core built in-house over three decades. Selection processes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay, for retail banks, digital banks, consumer lenders and insurers.
That range matters more than any single one of them. A selection is not a feature comparison — it is a bet on which constraints you are willing to live with for the next five to ten years, and you can only price that if you have seen several of them in production.
Selected work
Core selection and migration at a consumer lending holding
Led the selection of a cloud-native core banking platform, its implementation, and the migration of more than 300,000 accounts as the portfolio grew during the rollout. Built the open banking API strategy, the decoupled microservices risk platform and a cloud-native data warehouse alongside it.
Decoupling a proprietary AS/400 core at a century-old insurer
Designed the scenarios for decoupling a core built in-house over decades, without interrupting the operation. The work ran alongside a rebuild of pricing, claims and administration processes, and produced the first insurance API in the Argentine market.
Core evaluation for a greenfield bank
Ran an RFP across three core platforms for a bank that did not exist yet, including on-site assessment of one of them in Brazil, and defended the resulting business plan in front of the shareholders of the parent insurance group.
Core upgrade inside a multi-year bank transformation
Assessed core capabilities in year one and migrated the platform to its current version as part of a programme that also delivered the group's first Banking-as-a-Service capability, a digital wallet and a new digital channel.
Contact
If you are building, rebuilding or rescuing a technology organisation, write to me at hernan@hernancurras.com. A first conversation costs nothing and usually takes thirty minutes.
Also on LinkedIn.