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Legacy IT Inhibits Business Change in Financial Services

Global leaders in financial services and insurance (FSI) believe that legacy IT infrastructure and applications are holding back their business transformation aspirations and automation objectives, according to a new report, Financiers ridden with technical debt, from The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU), supported by Appian.


The need for business agility, spurred by recent global events, is causing FSI organizations to reimagine how they do business as they work at an accelerated pace to adapt to change.

Key findings include:

■ 71% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) in FSI organizations report that the growth of technology project requests exceeds IT budget growth, which is higher than the global average of 64%.

■ 87% of respondents say their organization has encountered operational difficulties in addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic.

■ 81% of FSI leaders say their organization needs to improve its IT infrastructure and applications to better adapt to external change.

■ 44% of ITDMs believe inadequate collaboration between the IT function and business units is a chief barrier to digitization, compared to 27% of business decision-makers.

According to survey findings, automation is viewed as being one of the most important technologies over the next 12 months by 31% of global financial services executives. The report highlights that more than a third (34%) of ITDMs believe that the reduction or elimination of legacy IT would most help their organization achieve its automation objectives.

However, only 17% of financial services business decision-makers believe that overcoming legacy IT would be a key factor in helping their firms to embrace automation.

"Financial services and insurance companies must bolster collaboration between IT teams and the business units they serve. Both groups recognize the need to collaborate more to meet their digital and automation ambitions with speed, quality, and security. Our report shows that by working together, modernizing dated legacy systems, and adopting agile methodologies, organizations can overcome barriers to digitization," said Michael Heffner, VP of Solutions and Industry Go-to-Market at Appian.

Methodology: Financiers ridden with technical debt is based on a survey conducted by The EIU of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) and senior business executives at financial services, banking, and insurance corporations around the globe.

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Legacy IT Inhibits Business Change in Financial Services

Global leaders in financial services and insurance (FSI) believe that legacy IT infrastructure and applications are holding back their business transformation aspirations and automation objectives, according to a new report, Financiers ridden with technical debt, from The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU), supported by Appian.


The need for business agility, spurred by recent global events, is causing FSI organizations to reimagine how they do business as they work at an accelerated pace to adapt to change.

Key findings include:

■ 71% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) in FSI organizations report that the growth of technology project requests exceeds IT budget growth, which is higher than the global average of 64%.

■ 87% of respondents say their organization has encountered operational difficulties in addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic.

■ 81% of FSI leaders say their organization needs to improve its IT infrastructure and applications to better adapt to external change.

■ 44% of ITDMs believe inadequate collaboration between the IT function and business units is a chief barrier to digitization, compared to 27% of business decision-makers.

According to survey findings, automation is viewed as being one of the most important technologies over the next 12 months by 31% of global financial services executives. The report highlights that more than a third (34%) of ITDMs believe that the reduction or elimination of legacy IT would most help their organization achieve its automation objectives.

However, only 17% of financial services business decision-makers believe that overcoming legacy IT would be a key factor in helping their firms to embrace automation.

"Financial services and insurance companies must bolster collaboration between IT teams and the business units they serve. Both groups recognize the need to collaborate more to meet their digital and automation ambitions with speed, quality, and security. Our report shows that by working together, modernizing dated legacy systems, and adopting agile methodologies, organizations can overcome barriers to digitization," said Michael Heffner, VP of Solutions and Industry Go-to-Market at Appian.

Methodology: Financiers ridden with technical debt is based on a survey conducted by The EIU of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) and senior business executives at financial services, banking, and insurance corporations around the globe.

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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...