A slideshow about legacy core systems in banking and the need to update them, by Victor Notaro.

1. The Importance of Banks
GOING DIGITAL
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2. In a more and more digitalized world, it's not
just time for banks to pull the trigger on
modernizing the ancient legacy core system, it’s
also time for them to realized the importance
of digital onboarding.

3. American customers are demanding better
products and better experiences from their
banks. As technology becomes faster and more
convenient elsewhere, it is expected of the
banking experience as well. And the rising
number of digitally-based banks is going to
make this a more urgent problem to solve.

4. According to this Accenture.com article: “The
2014 North America Consumer Digital Banking
Survey of nearly 4,000 bank customers in the
US and Canada, evidence suggests that
traditional banks have a somewhat uncertain
relationship with their customers despite the fact
that in the US nearly 40 percent of customers
—64 percent in Canada—have been with their
current bank for over the past decade or more.

5. Results of the survey indicate that customers
want a bank that’s nimble and proactive, one
that can be a part of their daily lives. The idea
of “convenience”in banking is undergoing a shift
away from branch locations and toward digital
products and services that mesh with consumers’
"smart" mobile-empowered lives. Also, banks that
cling to the status quo risk being viewed more
like utilities that conduct financial transactions.“

6. Core legacy systems in banks keep information
in a number of independent, unlinked areas, which
make updates impossibly difficult. Updating one
thing often means that someone has to go in
and manually change that one thing in every
core and system that the core is connected to.
This includes areas like onboarding, billing
systems, and the customer relationship
management system. They all must be updated
individually, which can take months to complete
per individual update.

7. Onboarding clients used to be a very operations-
based and compliance-driven enterprise, not set
up for optimal customer service because the
customers coming in to your banking system
would interact with banks face-to-face, with
employees and managers who (hopefully) put
excellent customer service at the forefront.

8. Now that you may never have a customer walk
into a brick-and-mortar location in the entirety of
the time that are a banking customer, the
interface and buildout of your onboarding is the
first touchpoint your clients will have with your
bank. And possibly the only touchpoint.
Successful banks who seek customer retention
need to understand the importance of an error-
free, friendly, and adaptive system from the
beginning.

9. The recent system failures at Westpac, HSBC,
NatWest, who all had customers unable to bank
with their institution, and SunGard whose glitch in
a legacy system led to a disruption of the
pricing of billions of dollars of assets, and had
to involve financial regulators, are all prime
examples of the way that layering technology
on top of fundamentally outdated core legacy
systems can only be considered a stop-gap, and
can never a permanent solution.

10. Attempting to add digital channels on to the
aging core will only serve to magnify the
outdated system’s flaws. While many in the
industry speak doubtfully about the ROI of
completely overhauling a legacy system to a
brand new core, and the risks associated with
such an overhaul are high, the high demands and
expectations of the consumer and the newer
competitive digitally-based banks will ultimately
end up making the decision for you.

11. The analytics power of updated technology and
the way that it can monitor trends, habits, the
amount of time lingering on a page is an
immeasurable benefit. The more data you can
collect, the more profiling of the needs of the
consumer, the more arsenal you have at your
disposal to give them exactly what they want.

12. Harnessing modern technology from
the first interaction to the core
processes will, in the end, be the
determining factor in the battle for
customer loyalty.