The floor of services that must keep running, declared and signed.

What it is

The Minimum Viable Bank (MVB) is the bank's declared floor, the services and supporting capabilities that must remain available under foreseeable stress, including the days when the surrounding systems are not. The MVB is a subset of the IBS register, not a duplicate of it.

It exists to give the bank, the regulator, and the customer the same answer to a simple question: if a meaningful chunk of your environment goes dark, what stays on?

Why it matters

SAMA's operational-resilience framework expects banks to have thought concretely about minimum operating capability. The MVB is the artefact that makes that thinking testable, once you've declared a floor, you can drill against it, find the gaps, and close them before the next stress event.

Internally, the MVB also forces useful conversations. Which sovereign-mandated services bypass the gating? What design ambitions sit behind the floor? Which services are running on a single supplier with no continuity plan? The declaration process surfaces all of this.

How MARSAD frames it

MARSAD treats the MVB as a scoped, recurring declaration rather than a static document:

• Scope is bounded explicitly, which IBS are in, which are out, and which are in by virtue of a sovereign mandate.
• Operating attributes are recorded for the declaration as a whole: readiness state (cold / warm / hot / live) and three design ambitions (tech-stack mode, sync model, recovery exit). Together they fix the bank's tolerance posture in a way a regulator can read off the declaration without a separate document.
• Sign-off uses a dual pattern, chief risk officer and accountable executive sign in parallel, both names visible on the declaration. No single point of attestation.
• Drills against the declared MVB are first-class. The drill outcome attaches back to the declaration so reviewers can see "this is what we said, and this is what happened when we tested it."

What customers see

• An MVB declarations panel showing the active declaration, its sign-off ledger, and the history of prior versions.
• A scorecard slice on the home view that surfaces MVB scope, outcome coverage, and lifecycle health separately from the broader IBS register.
• Drill outcomes linked to the declaration they tested, with traceability into the four governance pillars.
• An MVB-scoped evidence pack, a signed PDF + JSON bundle that walks a regulator through scope, signatories, drills, and findings without dragging the rest of the IBS register into the conversation.