Julian Farley, Sales Director for the UK and EU at BPC, argues that the true cost of ageing payments infrastructure is far higher than it appears, according to an article in The Fintech Times.
- Legacy systems only look cheap because they are already depreciated — in reality they absorb change budgets, slow product launches and turn regulatory updates into bespoke engineering work. BPC’s Modernisation Without Disruption guide puts numbers to this: for a mid-sized issuer processing 10 million debit attempts monthly, a 0.50 percentage point rate of avoidable false declines means 50,000 lost transactions and $1.5 million in forgone spend each month.
- Europe’s outage record makes the resilience risk concrete. The UK Treasury Committee recorded at least 158 banking IT outages between January 2023 and February 2025, including a Barclays incident where 56% of online payments failed and compensation costs were expected to reach £5-7.5 million. The ECB’s TARGET Services suffered a similar failure in February 2025 after a storage hardware fault suspended settlement processing for hours.
- Modernisation changes the equation, Farley says. Modular, API-led platforms let banks upgrade components independently, add services like tokenisation or BNPL without reopening the core, and shift engineering effort from maintenance to revenue-generating work. BPC cites its own SmartVista platform, deployable across major clouds with phased, no-downtime migration, alongside client examples: Lithuania’s Artea Bank moved issuing to the cloud, Romania’s Banca Transilvania rebuilt its card infrastructure to support 8 million cards, and Bulgaria’s DSK Bank migrated 3 million accounts to euro payments while cutting fraud false positives.
