Why Financial Insitutions Are Modernising Their Oldest Systems First: Murex, Payments and Wealth Platforms
When financial institutions talk about digital transformation, the focus often falls on new digital services, but in practice, many are prioritising the modernisation of their oldest, most critical platforms first. Murex, payments, and wealth systems now represent the greatest source of operational risk and strategic constraint, making them the logical starting point for sustainable, regulator‑ready transformation.
Jack Braeman
Delivery Lead, North America
jack.braeman@caspianone.co.uk
When banks talk about digital transformation, the conversation often drifts towards cloud-native services, AI adoption, or greenfield innovation. That narrative sounds progressive, but it misses what is actually happening in practice.
Across capital markets, retail banking, and wealth institutions, I am seeing banks prioritise modernisation of their oldest and most deeply embedded systems first, particularly Murex environments, payments platforms, and wealth management systems. These platforms underpin revenue, regulatory compliance, and client experience at scale, and in many cases, they are now the largest source of operational and strategic risk.
This shift aligns with broader industry analysis suggesting that banks can no longer delay modernisation of their core and adjacent platforms while focusing solely on digital front ends. McKinsey has previously highlighted that many banks “hollowed out” their cores to extend their lives, but that this approach is now reaching its limits as competitive and regulatory pressures increase.
Why these systems are first in line for modernisation
Banks are not modernising randomly. When budgets are constrained and scrutiny is high, institutions focus on systems where failure, latency, or instability would have an immediate and material impact.
Murex continues to sit at the heart of capital markets operations across trading, risk, and post-trade processing. Payments platforms are now a clear competitive differentiator for corporate and institutional clients demanding speed, availability, and transparency. Wealth platforms increasingly support high transaction volumes from high-value clients who expect continuously available, digitally native services.
Industry research reinforces this priority. McKinsey notes that legacy back-end systems, while often stable, are increasingly “inflexible and slow to change,” making them a bottleneck for both innovation and operational resilience. From my perspective, this is less about transformation ambition and more about protecting the foundations that everything else depends on.
The challenge of modernising systems that cannot fail
What makes these modernisation efforts particularly complex is that these platforms cannot simply be switched off or rebuilt in isolation. Systems like Murex are deeply embedded across front‑to‑back processes, tightly coupled to downstream risk, finance, and reporting functions, and operate continuously in live market environments. In many banks, Murex has been customised, integrated, and extended over years, sometimes decades, which means its behaviour is shaped as much by institutional knowledge as by documentation.
Most banks therefore recognise that removing it entirely is unrealistic in the near term. The operational risk, regulatory exposure, and sheer scale of change involved make wholesale replacement hard to justify, particularly when the system is still performing its core function. Instead, modernisation tends to focus on carefully managed upgrades, architectural decoupling of surrounding services, performance improvements, and incremental reduction of operational fragility. That can include isolating specific workflows, improving integration patterns, or refactoring high‑risk components, all while the platform remains live and business‑critical.
This approach is slower and more constrained than greenfield development, but it reflects the reality of operating complex banking systems at scale. The challenge is about sequencing change in a way that preserves stability, meets regulatory expectations, and ensures that the bank can continue to operate confidently throughout the modernisation journey.
The same applies to payments and wealth platforms, which are often layered with years of bespoke development, regulatory adaptations, and vendor integrations. These systems function, but they were not designed for real-time expectations, cloud, or continuous change. Banks are now spending the majority of their IT budgets maintaining legacy platforms rather than building new capability, while the pool of people who truly understand those platforms continues to shrink. Modernisation therefore becomes a risk management exercise as much as a technology programme.
Balancing agility with long-standing legacy realities
There is a growing recognition that agility cannot simply be “bolted on” to decades-old systems. Banks are instead taking phased, controlled approaches to modernisation, isolating critical functions, introducing modern integration layers, and selectively using cloud infrastructure where risk allows.
Payments is one of the clearest examples of this balance. Clients increasingly benchmark banks on execution speed and uptime rather than pricing alone. As a result, banks are investing in more modern, composable payment hubs while still supporting existing rails and regulatory requirements. Gartner’s 2026 Magic Quadrant for Banking Payment Hub Platforms reflects this trend, emphasising real-time processing, ISO 20022 adoption, and progressive modernisation over big-bang replacement.
What this translates to operationally is cautious evolution rather than radical change, prioritising predictability and resilience alongside speed. The reason is simple. These programmes are taking place in environments where stability is non‑negotiable, regulatory tolerance for failure is low, and even minor disruption can have outsized downstream impact. Large‑scale, sudden change introduces too many unknowns across systems, teams, and controls that were never designed to move in lockstep. Incremental modernisation allows banks to test assumptions, manage risk, and preserve confidence from regulators, internal stakeholders, and clients, while still making tangible progress. Speed still matters, but it has to be delivered in a way that is observable, reversible, and defensible at every stage of the journey.
Why expertise is now the biggest constraint
Across all of these modernisation initiatives, the most consistent limitation I see is not tooling or funding but the availability of specialists.
Murex expertise is a shrinking pool because it is highly niche, largely acquired on the job, and tied to long‑standing proprietary implementations that differ from bank to bank. Few engineers actively choose to specialise in it today, while many of those who did are becoming increasingly senior in profile.
Payments modernisation, meanwhile, demands engineers who can operate comfortably in distributed, always‑on environments while also understanding regulatory controls, settlement risk, and operational resilience. That combination is difficult to find and takes years to develop.
Wealth platforms add another layer of complexity, requiring people who can work fluently across data integrity, client experience, and legacy integration at the same time. These domains are rarely mastered in isolation, which means banks are competing for a small number of individuals who can bridge multiple worlds. As a result, expert availability becomes a structural constraint on how quickly and safely these systems can be modernised.
EY’s research into core banking modernisation highlights the declining availability of legacy skills as a major risk factor, particularly as modernisation programmes often span several years and must operate alongside live systems. This is why successful programmes take an expert-first approach, anchoring delivery around senior specialists who understand the system’s history as well as its future and building sustainable teams around that expertise rather than relying on short-term fixes.
Wealth platforms and rising client expectations
Wealth management systems are increasingly being pulled into this early modernisation wave due to client‑driven pressure, because the way clients interact with their wealth has changed far faster than the platforms supporting it. Mass affluent and high‑net‑worth clients now expect real‑time access, frequent interaction, and seamless digital self‑service across portfolios, reporting, and transactions. That shift places sustained strain on legacy wealth platforms that were designed for lower transaction frequency, adviser‑led workflows, and batch‑based processing. As client activity increases and tolerance for downtime or friction decreases, these systems become a point of operational risk rather than quiet infrastructure. Modernising them earlier allows banks to protect service quality, support future growth, and avoid a scenario where client experience ambitions outpace the underlying technology.
In practice, what I see is banks internalising more platform capability, reducing vendor dependence where possible, and modernising wealth systems earlier than many would have expected even a few years ago. This is driven less by cost alone and more by the need for control, flexibility, and speed of change in areas that directly affect client experience and revenue. Relying heavily on third‑party platforms can limit how quickly firms respond to shifting client behaviour or regulatory demands, particularly when those platforms were not designed for today’s levels of digital interaction. A recent McKinsey article on the future of wealth management reflects this shift, noting that firms will need far deeper platform capability to deliver scale, personalisation, and reliability as client behaviour continues to evolve.
Where do we go from here with banking modernisation?
Modernising Murex, payments, and wealth platforms first is not conservative decision‑making. It is strategic prioritisation under real constraints. These systems sit at the centre of revenue, risk, and reputation, and they determine how far and how fast banks can realistically evolve. The next phase of banking modernisation will therefore build outward from these foundations rather than skipping past them. Banks that stabilise and modernise core platforms early create the conditions needed to introduce new capabilities with confidence, whether that is greater automation, improved client experience, or more advanced use of data and AI. From my perspective, tech modernisation in banking is becoming less about bold transformation narratives and more about sequencing change responsibly. The focus is shifting from proving ambition to sustaining delivery. The oldest systems are the hardest to change, but they are also the systems that everything else depends on, which is why getting this phase right matters more than anything that follows.
How Caspian One Helps
Caspian One supports banks where modernisation is constrained by complexity, risk, and the need to keep critical systems running. Through our infrastructure expertise, we connect institutions with specialists who have hands-on experience modernising live, high‑throughput environments, from platform resilience and cloud migration to infrastructure automation and service reliability. Rather than treating infrastructure as a standalone technology layer, we work with clients to strengthen the foundations that support trading, payments, and wealth platforms, ensuring systems can evolve incrementally without compromising stability. By providing access to niche skills and delivery‑focused teams, Caspian One helps banks modernise legacy infrastructure in a way that is controlled, pragmatic, and aligned to real operational demands.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available, AI-assisted research and Caspian One’s market expertise as of the time of writing; written by humans. It is intended for informational purposes only and should not be considered formal advice or specific recommendations. Readers should independently verify information and seek appropriate professional guidance before making strategic hiring decisions. Caspian One accepts no liability for actions taken based on this content. © Caspian One, 2026. All rights reserved.
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