The Cost of Standing Still: Modernising Legacy Systems Without Losing Control

On Thursday 23rd April 2026, Capacitas hosted a roundtable for Finance Leaders in cooperation with The Financial Times.

Driving modernisation at pace while safeguarding resilience, governance, and financial discipline.

Thursday 23rd April 2026, Financial Times, Churchill Room, Bracken House.

Overview

Financial institutions are grappling with the accumulated burden of legacy technology. Decades-old core systems, ageing mainframes and poorly integrated applications have created mounting technical debt - the cost of maintaining and building on outdated infrastructure. As competitive pressure intensifies and regulators scrutinise operational resilience, these legacy estates are emerging as a material source of outages, operational errors and strategic constraints. The scale of disruption in recent years underlines the vulnerability: high-profile system failures and operational mistakes have exposed both financial and reputational risk.

Banks are investing heavily in cloud migration, data consolidation and AI-enabled tooling to address these weaknesses. Modernisation promises improved resilience, faster fraud detection, better data visibility and long-term cost efficiency. Yet transformation carries its own risks. Large-scale migrations can trigger service disruption, cloud costs can escalate without effective governance, and hybrid architectures introduce new layers of complexity and vendor dependency. Many financial institutions therefore face a strategic dilemma: move too slowly and competitive relevance erodes; move too quickly and operational stability is put at risk.

This Financial Times event, hosted in partnership with Capacitas, brought together senior technology leaders from across financial services to examine the “cost of standing still”. The roundtable focused on how firms - particularly those lagging digital-native peers - can accelerate change while maintaining operational stability, regulatory alignment and financial discipline. The discussion explored how peers are managing technical debt, controlling cloud costs and modernising legacy estates without disrupting customers or inviting regulatory scrutiny.

Discussion points

• How can financial institutions meaningfully quantify the cost of technical debt and delayed modernisation?
• At what point does caution around transformation become a competitive risk?
• How should firms balance speed of delivery with the need for operational resilience and regulatory assurance?
• Where do cloud migrations most commonly introduce hidden or escalating costs, and how can these be governed?
• What practical models allow legacy systems to be modernised incrementally rather than through high-risk “big bang” transformation?

Moderator: Aine Quinn, World News Desk Editor, Financial Times

If you would like to attend future roundtable events with the Capacitas team or have suggestions for certain topics, please email us at marketing@capacitas.co.uk