Corporate Banking Services
Corporate Banking - Revolutionising Corporate Banking Solutions
01/THE CHALLENGE
Project Overview:
A regional corporate bank set out to modernize the digital experience it offers to its business and corporate clients — companies that manage payroll, bulk payments, trade finance, and multi-signatory approvals through the bank. The existing system was a legacy web portal, largely unchanged for over a decade, that had become a growing liability as client expectations shifted toward the kind of speed and clarity they were used to in consumer fintech apps.
The engagement covered the end-to-end redesign and rebuild of the corporate banking portal: account dashboards, bulk and single payment initiation, multi-level approval workflows, statement and reporting tools, and user/role administration for corporate clients managing teams of finance staff with varying permission levels.
02/ELARA'S APPROACH
Objective
The bank's goals for the project were to:
- Replace an outdated, transaction-only portal with a modern dashboard that gives finance teams real visibility into cash position, pending approvals, and payment status at a glance.
- Reduce the time and friction involved in initiating and approving bulk payments (payroll runs, supplier batches, cross-border transfers).
- Support flexible, configurable approval hierarchies (maker-checker, multi-level sign-off) to match how different corporate clients actually structure their finance teams.
- Improve auditability and compliance reporting without adding manual work for client-side admins.
- Do all of this while meeting strict security and regulatory requirements for financial data and transaction integrity.
Solution
- Unified dashboard, giving each corporate user a role-appropriate view: real-time account balances where available, a consolidated pending-approvals queue, and payment status tracking that surfaced batch-job delays transparently instead of leaving users guessing.
- Configurable approval workflow engine, letting bank admins set up maker-checker and multi-tier approval rules per client, with threshold-based routing (e.g., payments over a set amount automatically require an additional approver).
- Bulk payment tooling with clear validation feedback before submission (catching formatting errors, duplicate entries, and threshold breaches up front), reducing failed batch submissions.
- Role-based access control for corporate admins to manage their own team's users and permissions without needing the bank's support staff involved for routine changes.
- Audit and reporting layer, generating exportable logs of who approved what and when, satisfying compliance requirements with minimal manual effort from clients.
- A design system built for two audiences at once — dense, data-rich views for power users, and simplified mobile-friendly approval flows for occasional users — built on a shared component library so both stayed consistent and maintainable.
- Resilience around legacy system gaps, with the frontend explicitly communicating when data was "as of last batch run" versus real-time, rather than presenting stale data as current.
03/DELIVERED OUTCOMES
Outcome
- 40% faster payment processing. Bulk payment initiation-to-approval time dropped from an average of 2 days to under 12 hours, driven by the consolidated approvals queue and upfront validation that eliminated most rejected/resubmitted batches.
- 99.9% payment submission accuracy, with pre-submission validation catching formatting errors, duplicates, and threshold breaches before they reached the core banking system
- 90% client adoption of self-service admin tools within the first quarter post-launch, reducing operational load on the bank's client-services team.
- Zero critical security or compliance incidents in the first year, with audit logs cited by the bank's compliance team as a meaningful improvement over the legacy portal's reporting.
- Client satisfaction score rose from 6.2 to 8.7 (out of 10) in post-launch surveys, with the most-cited improvements being clarity of payment status and ease of approving payments on mobile.
- Expanded to 3 additional corporate client segments (trade finance, payroll bureaus, and treasury desks) within 18 months, on the strength of the platform's configurable approval engine handling their differing workflows without custom rebuilds.
Client Profile
INDUSTRY
Regional retail & commercial bank offering dedicated corporate/business banking services
End Users
Corporate finance teams — controllers, treasury staff, payroll administrators, and designated approvers/signatories within each client company
Business Goal
Retain and grow corporate banking relationships by closing the experience gap with newer digital-first business banking competitors, without a full core-banking replacement
TEAM
- Project Manager
- Back-End Developers
- Front-End Developers
- QA Specialists
- DevOps Engineers
TECH STACK
INFRASTRUCTURE
- Cloud hosting (AWS) with private networking back to the on-prem core banking system
- CI/CD pipeline with staged environments and heavier-than-usual QA/UAT gating given the transaction-integrity stakes
- Monitoring/observability (Datadog)
BACKEND/API LAYER
- Node.js
- Message queue + Worker processes to handle overnight batch jobs and bulk payment processing asynchronously, with status polling exposed to the frontend
- Rules engine module for the configurable multi-tier approval workflows
FRONTEND
- React with TypeScript, for a strongly-typed, maintainable component base across the dense internal-user views and simplified mobile approval flows
- TanStack Query for handling real-time-ish polling against slow legacy APIs, caching, and background refresh
- React Hook Form + Zod to catch bulk-payment formatting errors and threshold breaches client-side before submission
SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
- OAuth2/OIDC-based authentication with MFA, session management tuned for banking-grade timeout and re-auth requirements
- End-to-end encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest for sensitive financial data
- Centralized audit logging service capturing every approval action, exportable for compliance reporting
