Bermuda Commercial Bank
Stress-testing three parallel paths to a digital-first bank
The brief
Bermuda Commercial Bank (BCB) has spent decades serving a commercial niche in Bermuda, one of the world's most distinctive financial jurisdictions, and set out to turn those structural advantages into a modern, digital-first proposition.
It had three high-priority opportunities on the table at once. Each was promising in isolation, but each sat at a different stage of maturity and each carried a different kind of risk: commercial, technical, strategic. Together they raised a harder question: which were genuinely ready to build, and what would it take to deliver them safely?
BCB brought in Loomery to answer that question, running all three as rapid validation phases in parallel and coming back with clear, costed recommendations on what to build, in what order, and how.
How we worked
We ran three workstreams simultaneously over a single engagement. Each had its own product, design and engineering team with shared oversight across delivery, architecture and compliance, so we could treat them as one connected programme rather than parallel but disconnected projects.
The pace was only possible because AI was woven through the work across design, product and engineering, letting us move faster than a conventional discovery process allows. Core to it was the Project Brain: a centralised, queryable store of project context that team members and AI tooling could draw on to make fast, well-informed decisions.
With that foundation in place, AI reshaped how the team worked:
The three opportunities
A new financial product
Starting point
An identified commercial opportunity, offered manually to a handful of clients and unproven at scale.
Project outcome
A validated regulatory and commercial model, an end-to-end client experience designed down to the difficult edge cases, and a prioritised backlog ready to build.
An in-flight platform build
Starting point
A part-built platform, already live to early users, with open questions over whether its foundations were sound enough to scale.
Project outcome
An independent, layer-by-layer assessment separating what was solid from what needed hardening, and a pragmatic, low-risk route to production that protected the investment already made
A new market and channel
Starting point
A market opportunity with no defined product, roadmap or technology approach behind it.
Project outcome
A phased product roadmap and a cross-platform technology approach, balancing a near-term offering with a longer-term premium ambition.
We didn't look at the three in isolation. We mapped the dependencies and shared opportunities between them: where one proposition could launch inside another, where a single technical foundation could serve more than one, and where sequencing one first would de-risk the next. That let BCB see them as a single, coherent programme rather than three competing bets.
The results
In a matter of weeks, BCB went from three open, high-stakes questions to three decisions it could act on with confidence: a product cleared for build, a live platform with its risks understood and a safe route to production, and a new market opportunity backed by a costed strategy.
Because all three were assessed together and costed on a comparable basis, BCB's leadership could weigh them side by side and take a clear, evidence-based view to the board on where to invest next, and in what order. Work that would typically take months of separate discoveries was compressed into a single programme.
The bank now has a credible plan, and the evidence behind it, to realise its digital-first ambition.
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