Big banks are ramping up investment in digital services, as RBS announces a £ 2.5 billion investment and Lloyd’s announces an investment of £ 3 billion.

However, with TSB still reeling from its IT meltdown, banks must understand the complexities of their existing infrastructure, before they can transition to a more modern IT system, warns Nick Hammond, Lead Advisor for Financial Services at World Wide Technology.

Nick comments: “The approach to ‘going digital’ requires a step back to understand the sheer complexity of many modern banking IT systems, and the difficulty involved in changing them.

“Existing IT systems at older banks have grown into outdated, legacy infrastructures over years of successive development and acquisitions, with a convoluted web of interdependencies. Often the people who first set up these infrastructures have moved on from the company, leaving their successors with a complex, opaque network of applications which depend on each other in unseen ways, with no complete picture of how the system works.

“Before any change project can be implemented, banks must take the time to map out the existing systems and understand the interdependencies within the applications. To be able to adopt technology in a future-proof way, financial services firms need a bespoke strategy that accounts for every connection within the system before implementing change policies accordingly.”