UK's largest Islamic bank picks Monument Technology for core banking overhaul

AlRayan Bank, the UK's oldest and largest Sharia-compliant bank, has signed a core banking platform migration with Monument Technology, FinTech Futures reported Monday. Deal value, scope and timeline were not disclosed. The move extends a visible run of core modernization signings at smaller and specialist banks this month — including a US community bank migration announced 5 November and a large US lender's core modernization with Fiserv — as cloud-native core vendors chip away at legacy incumbents one niche institution at a time.

Core migrations reopen a bank's whole integration stack: data flows, customer documents and workflows get rebuilt, and specialist vendors for document processing, integration and process automation typically enter during the implementation phase rather than at contract signing. The pattern is relevant beyond the UK — in Indonesia, state savings bank BSN has been running a consultant-led assessment and vendor-selection exercise for its own core banking transformation since July. Financial institutions mid-migration tend to need core-agnostic ancillary systems so they are not locked to whichever core vendor wins.