Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO at Content Guru
Almost fifteen months since the introduction of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), regulators are shifting from the initial “transition year” leniency toward active enforcement. As a result, financial services providers must now demonstrate full oversight of every critical ICT provider within their technology stack.
Customer experience (CX) solutions pose a challenge for providers due to the fragmented nature of CX technology estates, which are becoming a growing risk to DORA compliance. In fact, research highlights that 1 in 5 CISOs cite software supply chains, such as those used for CX, as posing significant threats to organisations.
With fines and reputational damage looming for financial services providers that aren’t compliant, now is the time to ensure technology has been sufficiently modernised and meets regulations.
Consolidating your CX Estate to Improve Visibility and Meet Regulations
The challenge for many institutions is that they rely on a patchwork of legacy CX technologies, often acquired through mergers and acquisitions, deployed regionally without enterprise oversight, and often spanning multiple jurisdictions. These legacy systems are expensive and complex to maintain, with banks spending roughly a quarter of their IT budgets, around £3.8 billion annually, just to maintain their core systems, and can spend an additional £1.5 million annually on modification fees.
The introduction of DORA extends that financial burden far beyond the cost of legacy maintenance, with each separate CX vendor introducing additional regulatory overhead. To remain compliant with DORA, CIOs must negotiate contractual resilience provisions, conduct annual business continuity verification, maintain evidence of operational resilience testing, manage vendor concentration risk assessments, and coordinate cross-border data flow compliance. These costs quickly stack up, and DORA compliance costs across multiple vendors can range from £860,000 (€1 million) annually to £8.6 million (€10 million) or more.
Fragmentation also increases operational risk. Legacy systems are a major source of outages and downtime, with 53% of UK banks reporting service disruptions linked to legacy infrastructure. In turn, 42% have faced higher recovery and IT costs to address system failures, expenses that are now compounded by potential DORA penalties for operational disruption.
Consolidating complex CX infrastructure into one platform can deliver immediate reductions in both operational costs and regulatory complexity. Switching to a single application, especially one that is delivered through the cloud, will allow banks to achieve greater flexibility, meet multinational regulatory specifications, and instantly deploy the latest security updates, which isn’t possible within on-premises, legacy infrastructures.
How Modernising CX Can Unlock More Than DORA Compliance
De-fragmenting CX technology unlocks more than just meeting regulations. Modern cloud-based contact centre platforms provide the foundation for meaningful AI adoption, helping financial institutions improve both operational efficiency and CX.
A recent study from MIT highlights the stark divide emerging in generative AI adoption. Researchers found that 95% of generative AI pilots failed to deliver return on investment (ROI), creating what the researchers describe as the “GenAI Divide” between the small number of high-impact deployments, with most projects failing to scale. Yet, CX stands out as a sector where AI results are tangible. Contact centres are uniquely positioned to generate demonstrable ROI because they already operate with optimised people, processes, and data. This makes CX one of the first areas in which organisations can apply AI in a meaningful and measurable way.
AI is taking on much of the routine admin work that often consumes over 50% of a contact centre worker’s time, including:
AI reduces administrative workload, which often accounts for over 50% of an agent’s time, allowing contact centre workers to focus on delivering more meaningful, empathetic customer experiences:
- Before interactions, AI can capture customer intent while they are in the queue, enabling smarter routing and better-prepared agents.
- During interactions, AI can transcribe conversations and surface relevant information to the contact centre worker in real time.
- After interactions, automated note-taking, summarisation, and form-filling remove the need for the majority of manual wrap-up work.
Critically, CX leaders know when not to automate. When an interaction is highly complex, emotionally charged, or time-critical, it is better to be given to a human who can solve problems and can offer real empathy and understanding, leaving AI to deal with straightforward, low-sensitivity queries. This balance maximises both ROI and customer satisfaction, as customers don’t feel like they are being fobbed off to an AI chatbot in moments of need.
Remaining Compliant Through CX
Ultimately, the pressures facing banks today are not purely regulatory or financial. DORA is forcing institutions to scrutinise the resilience of every technology vendor in their ecosystem, while boardrooms simultaneously demand clearer returns from technology investments. For many banks, their CX suite sits directly at the intersection of these two priorities.
In an environment where both regulatory scrutiny and financial pressure continue to intensify, modernising CX infrastructure may prove to be one of the most practical and immediate ways for banks to achieve resilience and ROI.
