Bank of Valletta

The organisation

Bank of Valletta (BOV) is one of Malta's largest and longest-established financial institutions, providing retail, corporate and investment banking services across the Maltese islands and internationally. Operating in a small, closely contested and highly regulated market, BOV has continued to invest in modernising its technology and anti-financial-crime capability, including recent recognition for its compliance practices, while serving hundreds of thousands of personal and business customers.

The challenge

Loan and credit card origination at BOV was one of the most process-heavy areas of the bank's retail operations. Applications passed through intake, document verification, credit assessment, risk review and approval, with each stage living across documents, shared folders, spreadsheets and email threads. Applications sat in queues with no visibility of ownership, customer data was captured repeatedly, and reviewers spent more time chasing missing information than assessing cases. Customers waited weeks for decisions. Any solution had to be fully traceable, enforce approval authority by design, and satisfy the bank's security and architectural review before any production code shipped.

The solution

A local Maltese technology partner held the client relationship and domain knowledge, but the programme needed senior Power Platform capability it did not have in-house. the delivery team supplied a lead architect and a lead developer who embedded directly into the delivery team, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the partner's developers and business analysts across a combined team of six. The team's architect owned the solution and integration architecture end to end and represented the design in BOV's architecture and security governance forums, while the team's developer set coding standards, built core app and flow patterns, and mentored the partner's team through implementation. Given the regulated context, delivery followed BOV's standard waterfall methodology: a fully signed-off functional and technical design, a four-month build phase, and a two-month test and bugfix phase covering system, integration, UAT and security testing. The team delivered a single Power App spanning application capture through approval, a suite of Power Automate flows orchestrating stage transitions and delegated authority routing, and integration with core banking systems through REST APIs exposed via Azure API Management, giving the bank a governed, monitored boundary between the Power Platform layer and its systems of record.

How we ran it

1. 01

   Supply senior architecture and development capability

   The team provided a lead architect and lead developer to a local Maltese partner that held the client relationship.

2. 02

   Embed in the delivery team

   The team's specialists worked inside design workshops and the bank's own architecture and security review forums.

3. 03

   Deliver within a regulated waterfall process

   Followed BOV's signed-off design, four-month build and two-month test/bugfix phases before go-live.

4. 04

   Govern integration via Azure APIM

   Exposed core banking REST APIs through a managed, monitored gateway rather than direct platform connections.

The result

Within six months of build and hardening, the solution went live and is now part of the daily working process for more than 500 employees across branch, credit, risk and approval functions. End-to-end processing time for loan and credit card applications fell from several weeks to several days, giving BOV a direct competitive advantage in a small, closely contested market. Every decision and approval is now traceable to a person, timestamp and rationale, and the local partner's developers came out of the programme with reusable Power Platform delivery patterns.