The finance sector has mostly progressed to digital, with online apps transforming banking and financial services. As the last few years have shown, it is impossible to predict what technology a company should adopt in the future. The pandemic helped to accelerate digital growth but conversely has been one of the ultimate tests for businesses’ digital infrastructures, resulting in mounting technical debt within the financial services industry.
Technical debt is unavoidable given the advancing digital world, especially in the finance sector where businesses need to make sure they are prepared for all-around operational resilience. Operational Resilience (OR) is a hot topic for financial services where businesses must meet new UK standards introduced in 2022 by 31st March 2025, prioritising agility and visibility. According to Gartner, these initiatives coordinate management of risk assessments, risk monitoring and execution of controls that impact the workforce, processes, facilities, technology (IT, OT, IoT, physical and cyber-physical) and third parties across the following risk domains used in the business delivery and value realisation process.
According to a whitepaper by The Economist Intelligence Unit *, executives in the financial services, banking and insurance industries believe that legacy IT infrastructure is holding back their automation objectives. This interesting finding highlights the importance of acting now to avoid any potential setbacks.
Examples of technical debt within the finance sector:
- Running legacy systems which are no longer supported
- Investing in custom software which no longer fits the business
- Starting a development project well before any design takes place
- Having an ongoing development project with a long list of enhancements over a period of time, resulting in old solutions not being as user-friendly as possible
- Failing to update infrastructure platforms and databases, triggering poor quality data
- Non-standardised data model, causing poor data value and inconsistency.
Solving the technical debt within the finance sector
To identify the risk of the technical debt and monitor its impact, you need to find the root cause first. We’d subsequently advise creating a plan of action to enable your business to make better decisions. A systems health check and a tech roadmap could be applied to tackle outcomes in a critical order, whilst still maintaining productivity and profitability. Unaddressed technical debt can escalate quite quickly, meaning a business would need to bring in additional resources of technical experts to help address it. Most businesses have to monitor and action technical debt, it’s important to prioritise, be rigorous and resolve in order to push new digital strategies forward.
If you would like to find out more, seeing what’s involved in a technical debt checklist, or discover further information on technical debt within the retail sector then look no further.
Are you concerned about technical debt? Get in contact with us to look at tailored solutions to allow you to grow, thrive and compete.
