IT professionals losing faith in direction IT is going at banks

Last week I featured the views of a software development expert on why UK banks seem to have more software glitches than banks in other regions.

This followed a string of outages at UK banks of late with the biggest being to huge problems experienced by TSB following the migration of its core banking system to a new platform. But in the last couple of weeks customers of TSB, HSBC, Barclays, RBS and NatWest have all suffered problems connecting to digital services.

In the blog post Lev Lesokhin, senior vice president strategy & analytics at CAST, was scathing of UK software development practices.  He said Cast research has consistently shown the UK scores the lowest on all factors used to measure code and software health.

He even described some UK practices as “code-slinging cowboy DevOps.”

I received an email from an IT professional within the banking sector who agreed. He even said he is losing faith with the direction IT has take. This is worrying with IT today playing an even more central role in banking.

This is what he said. “I agree with [Lev Lesokhin’s]  comments – that’s what I’ve seen emerge over the last 20 years. “

He added that an increase in outsourcing and in particular offshoring has a part to play in the problems. “I also witnessed the brain drain out of the UK as offshoring took hold as well as the brain drain from firms as outsourcing grew. So a lot of the know-how that should have stayed in the banks and in the UK now sits within 3rd parties offshore. A self -inflicted injury in the ongoing quest for profits over social responsibility. Now it seems the legacy impact of that strategy is manifesting itself through increasing failures and extended fix times.

I’ve lost faith in the direction IT has taken. Total IT meltdown in the foreseeable future would not surprise me at all.”

How will fintech effect t or change this?

Please share your views.