Imagine you are the global head of treasury, managing funding for a trillion-dollar balance sheet. Your team might receive 20 different middle-office P&L reports and 20 different risk reports each day, covering dozens of markets around the world.

For banks, unifying data from individual neighborhoods, like lines of business or desks, depends on shared standards and normalized information. But just as cities run on physical infrastructure, sell-side institutions need common utilities to be cohesive. Infrastructures come together across platforms, systems, and architectures to process trades, manage risk, handle settlement, and serve clients.

That vision often collides with a harsh reality. Banks are operating the equivalent of a mid-century electrical grid and aging rail lines while trying to serve a 21st-century metropolis. They have been built on on-prem, server-based, and mainframe-based technologies over the last 40 or 50 years. M&A has reinforced that brittle legacy-system scenario, with minimal or no system integration.

The scale of the challenge

Part of the value of looking at transformation through a bank-wide transformation office is seeing the scale leaders in operational roles rarely do. Large financial institutions can have hundreds or even thousands of systems supporting their capital markets activities. That situation continues to spiral, with technology costs growing roughly four times faster than revenue, according to Accenture.ⁱ

On one hand, these technologies still have utility. They have staying power because they provide an edge that allows a business unit to operate and drive P&L. Even mainframes justify their survival because they do what business users need and preserve critical data going back, in many cases, to the 1980s. When something supports a trillion-dollar balance sheet, making the case for change takes a strong will.

On the other hand, there is significant functional overlap among all these systems. They include their own views and models for client records, transaction data, and lifecycle events across front-, middle-, and back-office platforms. The fragmentation makes seemingly easy questions hard to answer, such as having a single enterprise view of a client across the bank.

Future readiness compounds the sense that change needs to happen, even when as-is systems seem good enough for business as usual. When sell-side firms speak with us about the future, they understand that the infrastructure that served them for the last 40 or 50 years doesn't necessarily help growth in the next 40 or 50 years. Their current model leaves them poorly prepared to support innovation in areas such as digital assets, tokenization, and AI.

It also locks up resources and slows down performance. If you're still running a vintage mainframe, you may have a team of 30-40 people consuming maintenance spend. It also keeps manual, legacy processes in place because that’s what the technology allows. Meanwhile, buy-side institutions and investors are expecting real-time capability.