Regulators demand current, patched, auditable software. Business demands new features to compete with fintechs. Engineering is stuck in the middle, spending most of its time on neither. In 2018, TSB attempted to migrate 5.4 million customer accounts to a new platform over a single weekend. The migration failed catastrophically, locking 1.9 million customers out of online banking for weeks. The independent Slaughter and May review put the total cost at £330 million.1 In 2012, Knight Capital deployed a routine software update that accidentally reactivated a dormant trading algorithm and lost $440 million in 45 minutes before anyone could pull the plug.2
Both incidents trace back to the same root cause: fragile legacy systems where even small changes carry outsized risk.
1 TSB Independent Review, Slaughter and May, November 2019
2 SEC Administrative Proceedings, October 2013