92% of financial services companies in the UK are still relying on legacy technology.

If something doesn’t change soon, that remaining 8% will take over the whole market. 

While established financial services companies are struggling to tack new technology onto clunky, old-fashioned mainframes, challenger banks and FinTech startups are 10 steps ahead. They’re evolving customer expectations with rapid service, real-time visibility and smooth interfaces. Taking advantage of the fact that their infrastructure is cloud native and built for agility. 

To keep up, traditional financial services companies need to leave their legacy tech behind, but that doesn’t have to mean risking all of your stability on one “big bang” cloud migration.

Progressive replatforming – implementing a new, more agile platform alongside your existing tech stack – could help you reap the rewards of migration while cutting out most of the risks. 

In a moment, we’ll show you the four-step process we follow to help our clients build a progressive replatforming strategy that protects their processes, inspires their people and maximises their payoff. 

First, let’s consider why this approach is so powerful.

Why is progressive replatforming the answer?

The major benefit of progressive replatforming is that it allows you to test your new platform – and your migration strategy – on small, low-risk use cases. Instead of tearing out all of your existing infrastructure at once, you implement a new, more agile platform alongside your existing tech stack. 

Then you begin gradually moving processes over from your old infrastructure to your new, cloud-based platform. 

Each small migration teaches you something new, so that by the time you begin thinking about moving your core processes over to the new platform, you’re prepared for anything. 

Four steps to make sure your progressive replatforming strategy pays off

When we help our clients adopt this strategy, we follow a four-step process.

Step one: Set your goals

Do you want to improve the customer experience? Reduce risk? Improve your agility and ability to innovate? Reduce the cost of change? Adapt to new regulation?

Choose your goals and articulate them clearly. This will help you identify the right cloud platform for you – and understand which processes you should prioritise for replatforming.

Step two: Break the problem down

The key is to reduce complexity as much as possible here, so you should start by breaking your processes into small, manageable parts. 

Look for systems that are more independent – they aren’t reliant on lots of different processes, and there aren’t many other processes that rely on them. 

In big legacy systems, you’ll often find that one system meets multiple business needs. Can you extract one of those needs and split it off into its own system? 

This makes it easier to find the “low-hanging fruit” – the areas that you can migrate to the cloud while maintaining an acceptable level of risk.

Step three: Migrate your chosen processes

This is the stage where you lift and shift your systems or processes out of your data centre and move it to the cloud. 

You’ll probably start by building the substrate on which your processes are going to sit – finding a solid, reliable cloud platform. Ideally one that allows you to scale it up and down as needed, so you can start small and scale up as you move more processes over to the cloud. 

Once you’ve migrated one or two processes, what happens next?

Well, you start thinking bigger. Can you migrate an entire journey – like your mortgage or loan application process – to the cloud? Once you’ve started migrating these larger journeys, you can start thinking about decommissioning parts of your infrastructure that are no longer needed. 

Step four: Adapt your culture

Replatforming can mean completely changing the way certain processes – and certain people – work. Which means your people and processes need to adapt at the same rate as your technology. 

What those changes look like will depend on the exact processes you’ve chosen to replatform. It could be as simple as updating the way a process works or, as you move more systems to the cloud, as complex as changing parts of your organisational structure. 

You might find that you need to: 

• Train your people to use your new platform efficiently (and make sure they don’t get frustrated and abandon it for the same familiar processes they’ve followed for years). 
• Decentralise decision-making, so that different departments can adapt the way they use the cloud to suit their own processes. 
• Retrain and reallocate your talent. Legacy infrastructure often means team members spend hours deploying a change for production, a process that can take minutes once you move to the cloud. How can you use those people’s time more effectively once you migrate?

Create the change. Minimise the risk.

Progressive replatforming is, essentially, a smart way to make big changes without taking big risks. 

Instead of trying to overhaul everything at once, you can start small – migrating lower-risk processes first, building confidence and momentum along the way. 

By taking this more measured approach, you not only minimise risk but also set yourself up to learn and adapt as you go. Each step forward helps your team get more comfortable with the new platform. Before long, you’ll be ready to tackle the core systems that seemed too risky at the start.

Ultimately, replatforming isn’t just about moving to the cloud – it’s about reshaping your business for the future. 

For more insights on innovating in the financial services sector, download our whitepaper.