Moving your microfinance bank to a cloud core: a practical checklist
Licences, data residency, migration, parallel runs and the questions your board will ask — in the order you'll need them.
1. Start with your regulator
Before you compare vendors, write down what your licence requires: where data must be hosted, which returns you file, and who must approve a core change. Your choice of deployment model follows from these answers.
- Data residency and hosting approvals
- Regulatory returns and their schedules
- Outsourcing and business-continuity rules
The best migrations we've seen start with the trial balance, not the feature list.
2. Decide where data lives
Pooled, bridge, silo or sovereign: each trades speed against control. Most MFBs start pooled and move up when volumes or rules demand it.
3. Clean before you move
Duplicate customers, dormant accounts and mismatched loan schedules are cheaper to fix in your old system than in your new one. Run a data assessment early and agree what 'clean' means with operations and finance.
4. Run in parallel
For at least one month-end, run both systems and reconcile balances, interest and fees line by line. Differences are expected; unexplained differences are not.
5. Cut over
Freeze changes, take the final extract, load, reconcile to the trial balance, and open for business. Keep the old system read-only for audits.
