Core Banking Modernization

The activity of modernising core systems in banking is not new. Infact, it remains an ongoing endeavour in many financial institutions across the globe.

Core Modernisation tends to get less attention than transformation related to customer journeys and digital channels for obvious reasons, not least of which is that the latter tend to be directly visible. But, becoming a truly digital business requires not just the ability to move with agility at the front end of the customer experience, but requires baking in that agility from front to back.

The imperative to modernise core systems comes from five directions:

• Rising customer expectations shine a spotlight on an unsustainable mismatch between digital front-end experiences and batch-based core systems. With new entrants gobbling up ~15-20% of the industry’s new revenue, the mathematics of disruption is real, with much-needed economies of speed requiring incumbents to modernise the rigid core
• New entrant competition in the form of challenger banks, fintechs and bigtech are gobbling up market share. In the UK alone, more than 15M accounts have been opened with non-incumbents
• Spotlight on cost reduction - The low interest rate environment continues to put pressure on net interest margin. Continued pressure on the top line requires laser focus on cost income ratios. And, banks having collectively spent ~$1T in the last 4-5 years on technology, cannot ignore that ~70% of IT spend has been on (legacy) maintenance
• Resilience through modern technology - The pandemic has catapulted resilience and business continuity to the top of the corporate agenda. Modernising mission critical core systems is not an optional activity, but a matter of fundamental leadership responsibility. Modern (digital) technology and evolutionary paradigms make it possible to deliver core modernisation in bite-sized, more manageable chunks
• A cultural transformation - Organisations that design systems tend to end up with designs that mimic their organisational structures. The corollary being that siloed, monolithic and rigid systems cannot be expected to support financial institutions who are eager to transform their cultures into customer-centric, agile, design-led creative hives of innovation

Two patterns that banks are considering when it comes to core modernisation are:

Hollowing out the (legacy) core: A pragmatic, incremental approach where functions in the old code base ‘strangled’ and replaced with code that is designed and exposed as containerised services. A number of evolutionary design and development paradigms are utilised while delivering this sort of transformation, including domain driven design, distributed and decoupled architectures, lightweight runtimes, and cloud- native technology. All of which must solve for the hybrid interoperability which is the reality for any modern enterprise.

Renew legacy technology by buying / consuming new: This approach requires service enabling the core such that non-service literate (legacy) business applications can seamlessly interoperate with modern, service literate, distributed, cloud native applications consumed on bare metal on-prem, as SaaS and/or via the public cloud.

As the world’s leading opensource enterprise software company, Red Hat brings to bear the power of open technology innovation in the form of a platform upon which financial organisations can build their own digital innovation and an ideas-driven collaborative culture.

Partnerships with some of the world’s leading banking and financial services software vendors extends the capabilities of RedHat’s open hybrid cloud platform into the financial services industry.

This webcast will be held in English.