Legacy Payment Systems Squeeze Banks on Costs and Customer Experience

Banking has moved rapidly to apps and digital channels, but many institutions still rely on fragmented legacy payment and core systems built for batch processing and siloed operations. The mismatch raises maintenance and compliance costs while preventing staff and digital tools from sharing customer context in real time. It also leaves incumbent banks exposed to fintech competitors that can launch services faster and offer smoother experiences, turning infrastructure modernization into a customer-retention and revenue issue rather than a back-office technology upgrade.

Digital-services provider Sutherland said on Nov. 17, 2025, that 72% of customers expect immediate service, 70% expect bank staff to have their full interaction context and 64% say mobile apps cannot resolve support requests quickly, if at all. The firm also cited Forrester research estimating that a one-point improvement in the CX Index could generate $123 million in incremental revenue for a large multichannel bank, underscoring the potential payoff from replacing fragmented systems with cloud-native platforms, microservices and API orchestration.