Moving a 15-year-old payments core to the cloud, one slice at a time

Ruwaq Bank serves 1.2 million personal and business customers across the UAE from 48 branches and its app. Its payments core, built in 2010 on licensed software that was losing vendor support, processed every card payment, transfer and direct debit.

Two earlier attempts to replace it had stalled after a year each. The board wanted it off the old platform within eighteen months, without a single outage that customers would notice and with every step evidenced for the Central Bank of the UAE’s operational resilience requirements.

We mapped every flow in and out of the core over three weeks with Ruwaq’s architects and risk team, then ranked them by risk and value. Outbound transfers came first: high volume, well understood and easy to compare.

Each new service ran in shadow mode first, processing a copy of live traffic while a reconciliation job compared every result with the old core. Only when a service had matched for 30 days in a row did we switch it over, at 02:00 on a Sunday, with a one-click route back.

Thirty-one services and nine months later, the last flow moved across. The end-of-day batch that used to take four hours now runs in twelve minutes. Ruwaq’s own team, eight of whom we hired and trained alongside us, now run the platform.

Nine Kestrel people worked on it for twelve months, including a principal engineer, two tech leads and a delivery lead.