Customer profile
Al-Madar Private Bank (illustrative) is a Riyadh-headquartered private bank with approximately twelve billion riyals of assets under management across three offices. Their relationship managers serve some of the kingdom's oldest family wealth; their compliance team answers to SAMA and the CMA. Before Modir, they ran on a stitched stack — a foreign-built CRM, a portfolio accounting system from the early 2000s, an onboarding tool that produced PDFs to be wet-signed, and a custody connection accessed through the custodian's browser portal.
The challenge
Three problems made the platform untenable. First, every relationship manager began each client review by opening four systems, and the average review took fifty minutes — half of it in tab-switching. Second, the compliance team was running monthly spot-checks against audit logs that lived in three different formats, and findings always became debates because there was no single source of truth. Third, modernization felt impossible: the foreign-built CRM was too embedded to remove, but every Arabic and Hijri retrofit it received made it more expensive to maintain.
The breaking point was a SAMA examination in late 2024. The exam team asked for a structured export of every client interaction, every order, and every policy decision for a specific quarter — with timestamps in Hijri, content addresses for documents, and integrity proof. Producing it took eleven days and required pulling three engineers off feature work.
Why Modir
Al-Madar evaluated three vendors and a build option. Modir won on three criteria: data residency (the platform runs in me-central-1 with KSA data pinned — no cross-region replication unless explicitly enabled), localization architecture (Arabic and Hijri are first-class — not retrofitted), and audit posture (the hash-chained audit and signed exports map directly to what the SAMA exam team had asked for).
The clinching factor was the discovery workshop. In ninety minutes, the Modir team mapped Al-Madar's identity model to Zitadel + OpenFGA + OPA, walked through the audit chain construction, and showed a sample SAMA-aligned signed export. The compliance team flipped from skeptical to advocate in the same session.
Implementation timeline
- Week 1 — Discovery. 90-minute architecture workshop. Output: tenant scope, identity model, locale defaults, integration list, costed pilot.
- Weeks 2–3 — Provision. Tenant created in
me-central-1. Vault namespace seeded. Argo CD wired. Zitadel project provisioned with relationship managers, ops, compliance roles. OpenFGA tuples written. SAMA-aligned suitability questionnaire deployed. - Weeks 4–6 — Migrate. One advisor's full book imported (40 clients, 80 accounts, two years of transactions). Custodian feed wired. KYC vendor adapter (existing local provider) plugged in via the adapter pattern. Document templates ported to Carbone with locale formatters.
- Weeks 7–8 — Soft launch. First five advisors operational. First Modir-generated signed export reviewed against the previous SAMA submission. Audit chain genesis and first hourly verification reported clean.
Outcomes
The pilot ran into Q1 2025. By the end of the eighth week, the bank had replaced four systems for the pilot scope, the average client-review time had fallen by 64%, and onboarding for a new individual client — previously three weeks of paper signatures and back-office data entry — was three days end-to-end. The compliance team produced their next quarterly evidence pack on demand, in under a minute.
Quote
We expected the move to feel risky. Instead it felt obvious. The advisors stopped switching tabs. The compliance team stopped arguing about logs. The Saudi tenant was live in our region from day one. The hardest part was deciding what to do with the people we'd hired to maintain the old stitching.
Operations Director, Al-Madar Private Bank — Illustrative
Where they are today
Al-Madar (illustrative) has expanded the pilot to forty advisors across two offices, added the trading workflow with FIX connectivity to two custodians, and turned on the AI briefing graph for senior relationship managers — locale-aware Arabic outputs reviewed by the advisor before going to the client. The next milestone is the Eastern Province office in Q3 2026.
Outcome metrics
- 4 systems replaced for the pilot scope
- −64% client review time
- 3 days new-client onboarding (was 3 weeks)
- 11 → 0.05 minutes SAMA evidence pack
- 100% hash-chain integrity since genesis
- 0 cross-region data egress events
Stack
- Region: me-central-1
- Locale: ar-SA · Hijri
- Auth: Zitadel · OpenFGA · OPA
- KYC: existing local vendor adapter
- Custodian: two integrations
Illustrative case study based on representative deployment patterns. Customer name, quotes, and specific numbers are illustrative.