How OPT-NC migrated its entire retail banking business to Skaleet

  • Sector Banking
  • Country France (New Caledonia)
  • Use case Migration (Big Bang)

Software assets deployed

  • Account Management

  • Payment Engine

  • Savings

  • Card Issuing

  • Cheques

  • Customer Onboarding & Management

  • Risk & Compliance

  • Distribution Channels

  • Accounting

  • Pricing Engine

  • Process Automation

  • Data Analytics

  • Document Generation Engine

New Caledonia is a unique territory. It is 400 km long and 50 km wide, holds the world’s second-largest nickel reserves, and sits in a key geostrategic position in the Pacific. With a population of 270,000 and an exceptionally rich culture, it has remarkable potential for development.

At the heart of this momentum is the Office des Postes et Télécommunications de Nouvelle-Calédonie (OPT-NC), a leading public institution. It plays a major role in telecommunications and financial services and has become a central player in the territory’s digital transformation.

Through its banking arm, OPT-NC is one of the leading financial services providers in New Caledonia. The Office fulfills a banking accessibility mandate entrusted to it by the French State, with a network of branches and ATMs across the whole territory serving individuals, businesses and non-profit organizations.

Challenge:

For more than 40 years, OPT-NC’s financial services ran on an AS400 core banking platform. OPT-NC faced two major issues. The first was technical debt, which builds up in any information system and even more so in a legacy one. The second was a gradual loss of knowledge about the existing solution as the people who had designed it left the organization. Together, these made it hard for OPT-NC to keep pace with changing regulatory requirements, and hard to offer new products and services to its customers with the right level of effort and speed.

OPT-NC needed a partner that could take its financial services into the future. Starting in 2022, OPT-NC launched a deep transformation of its banking business. It first strengthened its governance and risk management through the “SAFE” program. It then fully replaced its information system through the “MANA” program, moving from a constrained legacy model to an open, agile and scalable one.

Why Skaleet:

Skaleet stood out for its ability to cover the full functional scope of a fully regulated bank. Because a single platform covered everything a retail bank does, the legacy core banking system could be replaced end to end, rather than through a slower, piecemeal transition.

Beyond the platform itself, two factors were key to the migration’s success. The first was a truly hands-on delivery model, with Skaleet teams closely involved in the day-to-day realities of the project. The second was the close working relationship between the OPT-NC and Skaleet teams and all the partners involved throughout the project.

The Solution:

The Skaleet platform fully digitizes payments, cards, accounts, savings, cheques and customer lifecycle management. This includes the legal and financial processes specific to a regulated bank: garnishment orders, transactions pending decision, pricing, interest rates and regulatory reporting.

The platform is also built on a single, shared set of assets that is versatile enough to cover a wide range of use cases. It combines broad functional coverage, fine-grained configuration, and automation powered by Skaleet Process Automation, so OPT-NC can tailor it to different customer segments.

To integrate the solution into the banking ecosystem, OPT-NC used pre-built connectors for critical use cases:

  • a card connector with Transactis and La Banque Postale

  • a screening connector with ComplyAdvantage

  • end-to-end payment management through Skaleet’s own Gartner-recognized payment hub

Polycea’s strong involvement as an integrator made it possible to connect the platform to OPT-NC’s own ecosystem. Ailancy reinforced OPT-NC’s project teams, particularly on business expertise and testing.

The migration was carried out as a “big bang”: 120,000 customers were switched over in a single cutover, driven by a cross-functional business team.

We are very proud to have supported OPT-NC in the end-to-end migration of its banking business to a modern, sustainable and scalable platform that serves the development of the territory and its people. At Skaleet, we believe core banking modernization shouldn’t be reserved for the largest banks. Our mission is to make it accessible to institutions of all sizes that urgently need to shed the weight of technical debt. To do that, we pair an ever-richer functional platform with a true ‘solution’ approach, so that an ambition to modernize becomes an operational reality.

The Results:

OPT-NC now operates an omnichannel model. Customers get the best of both worlds: the advice and proximity of a branch network, plus a full-scope, real-time mobile app covering every product.

Customers can now use a wide catalog of financial services remotely and on their own. For example, they can manage the entire card lifecycle themselves, including adjusting limits and blocking or unblocking a card, without going through an advisor. Within weeks of launching the new mobile app, My Infinéo, OPT-NC had already passed 15,000 active users.

New products also reach the market faster. On an island territory, that matters: a mobile-first, real-time platform reaches customers wherever they are, well beyond the physical footprint of a branch network.

The platform itself is built to evolve. It is 100% real-time, delivered as SaaS with no infrastructure to manage, built to the highest security standards, and fully API-enabled to make it easy to integrate third-party services. Continuous delivery means frequent updates, which solves the technical debt problem that drove the migration in the first place.