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Opinion

Is banking IT and business relationship still ‘them and us’?

As the UK government appoints senior IT executives at two banks to help it guide artificial intelligence deployment in the sector, Computer Weekly asked one IT professional in banking what he thought?

By
  • Banking IT professional
Published: 04 Feb 2026

This is a sweeping generalisation, but please bear with me as it makes a point. When I started in IT in the early 1990s, there were “IT people” and “everybody else”. Everybody else was known as “the business”.

The business thought IT was a back-office burden, which should not be seen or heard and preferably kept in the basement. One bank I worked for did, in fact, put the IT Infrastructure team in its underground carpark when it ran out of office space.

IT thought the business was there to torment it by asking the impossible without sufficient time, funding or resources. The two were quite separate and often worked in different buildings, cities or countries, so they could not get to know each other. Then we saw the trend for banks to outsource as much IT as possible to get rid of it. Bad move.

Jumping forward a couple of decades, the business eventually worked out what IT knew all along, which is that banks are, in fact, technology organisations that move money around electronically. With increased use of technology replacing branches, call centres and postal communications, the business was no longer needed by IT.

Efforts have been made more recently to integrate IT and the business, as the businesspeople now realise their futures depend on the IT people. Fortunes were reversed, and it was now IT that could dispense with the business. Hence, the rise of fintechs and virtual banks, along with a lot more automation and self-service.

Not listening

Unfortunately, businesspeople do not always listen to IT people because they have fundamentally different attitudes towards risk. Businesspeople make a point of taking risks as they are more likely to be motivated by financial, personal or political ambitions, whereas IT people are trained to avoid, mitigate or manage risks rather than take them. Two opposing philosophies.

This, I believe, is ultimately what caused problems for the Post Office and TSB (and many more) as the IT people knew the risks and issues all along, but the businesspeople overruled them. 

• Read more about the UK government’s plan to use banking IT professionals to help it steer AI adoption •

Using artificial intelligence (AI) technologists to keep the government and regulators informed is therefore more likely to be based on technical risk assessment rather than the vague cliches that businesspeople tend to use when talking about IT. I think the regulators should call in the AI heads of all the big UK banks to keep them up to date with what is going on.

I know this sounds like a case of “them” and “us” – and it still is. There are people who genuinely understand technology, and there are those who like to think they do, but they don’t.

Regulators need to talk to the most technically capable, unbiased and honest people they can find when it comes to AI. They should probably pull in some AI academics and researchers as well. AI is far too dangerous to be “unleashed”, as the UK prime minister put it last year.

Government is part of “the business” and may not realise that unleashing AI is like running blindly into one of the greatest risks society has ever faced. Perhaps AI is a good candidate for another U-turn, as it needs to be handled with great care, not let loose.

This opinion was written by a senior IT professional who has worked in the banking sector for decades.

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