Running and evolving platform, integration and managed-services workstreams for Standard Bank

At a banking group's scale, the hard problem is not building a platform once but keeping many platforms reliable while continuing to change them. Salesforce estates, MuleSoft integration layers, API marketplaces and insurance platforms all have to stay available and correct for the business that depends on them, even as new features and integrations are added.

Managed services for something like Stanlib spans both application support and the integration fabric beneath it — Salesforce and MuleSoft — so an issue can live in the business logic or in the flow of data between systems. Running that well means engineering teams who understand both layers and can keep them healthy together, not a help desk that logs tickets.

Layer on API marketplace and insurance API builds, DevOps for insurance platforms, a platform and feature engineering team, and onboarding observability into a Centre of Excellence, and the engagement becomes a portfolio of workstreams that has to advance the platforms and keep them reliable at the same time — the classic run-and-change tension at enterprise scale.

These are production systems a large financial group runs on. Integration failures, API outages or platform instability are not inconveniences — they interrupt the business and the customers behind it. Reliability is the baseline the whole engagement is judged against.

The other stake is momentum. A bank cannot freeze its platforms to keep them stable; it has to keep building — new APIs, new integrations, new features. The value of the engagement is doing both at once: evolving the platforms while holding their reliability, so change does not come at the cost of stability.

The engagement is structured as engineering workstreams rather than a single project. Managed services for Stanlib covers the Salesforce applications and the MuleSoft integration between systems together, so problems are diagnosed and fixed across the full path rather than bounced between application and integration owners.

Build work — the API marketplace, insurance API builds and platform and feature engineering — runs on DevOps practice: version control, automated pipelines and release management so changes to insurance and other platforms ship in a controlled, repeatable way rather than by hand.

Observability is engineered in rather than assumed: onboarding Splunk into a Centre of Excellence gives the teams visibility into how the platforms behave, so reliability is managed from evidence — what the systems are actually doing — instead of from guesswork.

Cloud23 provides Standard Bank Group with managed services and platform engineering across a portfolio of workstreams. Stanlib managed services keeps the Salesforce applications and their MuleSoft integration healthy as one connected estate rather than two separately owned layers.

On the build side, the teams deliver an API marketplace and insurance API builds, run DevOps for insurance platforms, and operate a platform and feature engineering team that continues to extend the group's platforms — all under release and integration practice designed to keep change controlled.

Onboarding observability with Splunk into a Centre of Excellence gives the group visibility into platform behaviour, turning reliability into something managed from real telemetry rather than reacted to after the fact.

The engagement centres on an integration and platform fabric: Salesforce as a system of engagement, MuleSoft as the integration layer connecting it to the wider estate, and API builds — including an API marketplace and insurance APIs — exposing capability across systems in a governed way.

Around that fabric sits the engineering practice that keeps it healthy and changeable. DevOps tooling provides the pipelines and release management for insurance and other platforms, so changes are versioned, tested and shipped repeatably. A platform and feature engineering team continues to build on the estate within that practice.

Splunk provides the observability layer, onboarded into a Centre of Excellence so telemetry from the platforms is collected and used centrally. This is what lets the group run and change at once: the integration fabric carries the traffic, DevOps controls how it evolves, and observability shows whether it stays reliable as it does.

The engagement gives Standard Bank Group engineering teams that both run and evolve its platforms — keeping the Salesforce and MuleSoft estate reliable through managed services while continuing to build APIs, integrations and features on top of it.

The API marketplace, insurance API builds and DevOps for insurance platforms give the group a controlled way to extend and release its platforms, so new capability ships without destabilising what is already in production.

Onboarding observability into a Centre of Excellence gives the group visibility into how its platforms behave, so reliability is managed from evidence — supporting the run-and-change balance the engagement exists to hold.