PODCAST | SA’s banks bear brunt of old systems and technology

The effect of old systems and technology in SA’s banks is the focus in this edition of Business Day Spotlight. 

Host Mudiwa Gavaza is joined by Ria Pinto, country and general manager for SA at IBM. Pinto articulates some of the issues facing banking technology in SA.

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In recent months, local banking customers have faced a number of outages in service. Standard Bank in particular has been hard hit. Its most recent systems outage was on May 21, when for more than six hours customers could not pay for transactions at point-of-sales devices or draw cash. 

Across the sector, many of these issues have been blamed on old technology and legacy systems. 

According to research firm Gartner, a legacy system refers to an information system that may be based on outdated technologies, but is critical to day-to-day operations.

With core banking services having remained largely the same over decades, Pinto says many of the systems underpinning these businesses have, in turn, been maintained without much change. 

A big problem lies with undocumented systems and businesses, which makes fixing or rectifying problems with older systems very difficult to do. 

IBM is deeply entrenched in the financial services industry, having been instrumental in creating some of the systems still being used in the sector many decades later. Pinto says about 30% of IBM’s business globally comes from customers in the financial services sector. 

Topics of discussion include banking technology; defining legacy systems and why they matter; IBM’s relationship with the banking sector; ways in which systems can be improved; and the need for documenting systems and business processes. 

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Business Day Spotlight is a MultimediaLIVE production.