Interview with Brad Goad, Global Head – Banking & Payments, Commercial Lead DXC – GROWTHX
From Legacy to Real-Time: DXC’s Vision for the Future of Banking
- What is DXC’s role in the financial services industry? DXC is very involved across the many sectors of the financial services industry. We’re very deep in insurance, obviously deep in banking, but also payments and other areas. We own a banking core called Hogan, which has deposits of roughly $5 trillion in transactions, about $2.5 to $3 trillion a day in debits and credits in terms of payments. So we are very integrated into the financial services sector, clients across the board, and our products and services range from professional services development, engineering, to actually software licensing.
- Why is modernization such an urgent priority for European and global banks today? And what is the DXC’s view? Well, the simple answer is the world is changing. The world is moving to real-time payments and settlement, and many of the banking institutions are running their banks on legacy systems that are still batch. So they aren’t able to keep up with not only just the daily reconciliation of transaction activity, but also the real-time needs of regulatory reporting. So the idea of modernization, or at least being able to get to a real-time state, is extremely important, no matter if you’re talking about North America or if you’re talking about Europe or South America or anywhere else in the world. The fact is technology has gotten way ahead of legacy banking systems. While the legacy banking system isn’t broken, there are a lot of great things, dependability, reliability, predictability in the legacy system, they need to bridge that gap. And so there’s a huge opportunity to arbitrage that gap between contemporary technology and financial systems with the legacy systems.
- How does DXC’s modernization as a service reduce risk and uncertainty for banks? Well, in terms of modernization as a service, in other words, where we’re taking, for example, old mainframe applications that are in COBOL and transforming those applications to, say, modern Java versions of those applications, that’s a huge project. Many of the older mainframe applications are not well-documented. They need to be rationalized. It isn’t just a matter of, hey, convert this code to this code. You have to go through the process of assessing all of the functionality, everything that those programs touch, all those applications touch. You have to rationalize them and take the functionality that you want and then convert it. That’s a very involved process, but it’s also a very necessary process. And again, you have to assess what are the business outcomes that you’re trying to achieve? And those are multiple fold.
- At EDFC, you presented Core Ignite. Why is it so important for the future of banking? Core Ignite represents, again, that opportunity to arbitrage legacy systems, which have a lot of benefits to them, and the new innovative technologies that are delivering the financial services applications of tomorrow. So Core Ignite is an operating system, much like you would think of Android or iOS running your phone. In fact, it’s a very easy analogy to think of your phone as the banking core, but what’s actually running your phone is Android. And then with Android, so you have the Google Play Store, right, where you can go download an application, install it onto your phone, set the settings, and then you’re using it. You then have that user experience, those use cases. Similarly, Core Ignite is doing the same thing for banking cores, where we are taking those applications, that ecosystem of other platforms, and pre-integrating it into the core. So Core Ignite then becomes the integration point or the orchestration point for all the ecosystem, all the fintech applications, and the legacy systems. Thus, you’re contracting or compacting the timeline for the legacy systems to take advantage of those new systems.
