Global Financiers 81% believe Legacy IT inhibits business change

Appian Today’s findings reveal that financial service and insurance leaders worldwide believe legacy IT applications and infrastructure are holding them back from realizing their business transformation goals and automating their operations. These are the findings of a new report, “Financiers ridden with technical debt,” from The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU), supported by Appian. The report’s findings are rooted in 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.

Recent global events are driving FSI organisations to rethink their business models and adapt faster to changes. Notably, 71% of ITDMs within FSI organizations claim that the growth of IT project requests exceeds IT budget growth. This is more than the global average of 64%. The following are other key findings:

• 87% of respondents said their organization faced operational challenges in dealing with the pandemic.
• 81% of FSI leaders believe their organization must improve its IT infrastructure and application to adapt to external changes.
• 44% of ITDMs feel that insufficient collaboration between IT function and business units is a major barrier to digitization. 27% are business decision-makers.

According to 31% global financial executives, automation is the most important technology in the next 12 months. According to the report, more than 34% of ITDMs think that reducing or eliminating legacy IT would be the best way for their company to achieve its automation goals. Only 17% believe that the elimination of legacy IT will be key to helping financial services businesses embrace automation.

Aegon, one of the world’s leading providers of life insurance, pensions and asset management, has been able to accelerate its delivery of IT applications by embracing digital automation and innovation.

“Automation initiatives are not easy and, with lots of teams launching projects in different groups, we risk making the same mistakes repeatedly. Building a central automation advisory group allowed our project teams to be independent and agile, but also benefit from the experience and hard-won expertise,” Boris Buis is the Intelligent Automation and BPM Lead at Aegon.

Aegon introduced governance security and provisioning to the entire organization in the DevOps area with 20 applications and 10 Appian-based teams. Today, Aegon’s Intelligent Automation Team has 8 total full-time employees with 2 dedicated to Appian and enables more than 16 federated DevOps teams within the business to support over 50 applications.

“Financial services and insurance companies must bolster collaboration between IT teams and the business units they serve. Both organizations recognize the importance of collaborating more in order to achieve their digital and automation goals with speed, quality and security. Our report shows that by working together, modernizing dated legacy systems, and adopting agile methodologies, organisations can overcome barriers to digitization,” Michael Heffner is VP of Solutions and Industry Go To Market at Appian.