By Lloyd Hopper, Regional Director of Sales Engineering EMEA at AlgoSec
As the digital landscape grows more complex, financial institutions are under pressure to deliver seamless user experiences while maintaining robust security. Falling short on either front can expose both the organisation and its customers to serious risks.
But how are financial institutions meant to navigate the complexity of meeting a raft of compliance standards? One emerging trend is platformisation; the consolidation of disparate tools and services into one digital platform that offers banks a single centralised location to manage expansive corporate IT infrastructures.
Driving factors behind the move to platformisation
The financial sector has been the victim of several high-profile IT outages. For example, in February 2025 the Lloyds Bank and Halifax banking apps suffered service degradation on payday, leaving thousands of transactions in transit and customers unable to access funds. As a result, the UK Parliament wrote to bank bosses and asking them to fully disclose the impact of the IT failures.
The complex IT infrastructures within banks limits holistic network visibility, with financial institutions blindsided to misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit. Because banks hold confidential financial data belonging to millions of customers, they are a prime target for cybercrime, with over 48% of finance and insurance companies identifying cyberattacks in 2024. Network complexity has triggered the shift to platformisation, as organisations prioritise greater transparency and enhanced security tools.
Meeting compliance standards
Compliance represents the governing parameters and guidelines that financial institutions have to operate within. Because of its critical importance, compliance must be firmly embedded into the digital operations of financial institutions, which is where platformisation comes into play. Platformisation enhances compliance by supporting secure third-party integration with security providers via APIs. By leveraging the best-in-class compliance solutions and technologies, financial institutions can benefit from scrupulous and seamless customer onboarding and 24/7 transaction monitoring.
Fulfilling Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and Identity Verification (IDV) requirements are fundamental to maintaining the integrity of the financial sector. The traditional siloed approach to compliance is no longer fit for purpose and leave organisations vulnerable. For example, ID checks would be carried out manually by the human eye, delaying the processing of applications and introducing the likelihood of human error. Moreover, the presence of siloed systems would impede dataflow and the ability to build a single customer view.
As a result, there is a need for a more cohesive approach. With platformisation, these intricate, regulatory processes can be managed and simplified from a centralised user interface.
Maintaining cybersecurity and service availability
Because cybersecurity and service availability are strongly governed by regulatory measures, banks must take advantage of platformisation to maintain robust defences and reduce the likelihood of downtime. Platform engineering, the technical discipline behind platformisation, provides the foundation to build scalable, API-first architecture that is critical to the digital operations of banks.
In terms of service levels, platform engineering breaks down financial applications into microservices, small independent modules that enable applications to run in the event of downtime. Once applications are decoupled, they can be transported to any computing environment via containerisation tools like Kubernetes and Docker, boosting operational efficiency and complying with service availability regulations.
From a security perspective, platform engineering drives a DevSecOps culture, where application development and security converge. Under the DevSecOps banner, developers are responsible for integrating security into coding and deployment workflows. This means that financial applications are built with redundancy in mind, with security patches and upgrades automatically assigned to significantly reduce the attack surface.
Platformisation – The future of financial compliance
Recent IT outages have exposed the fragility of the digital banking ecosystem, prompting the need for banks rethink their digital infrastructure. To protect themselves against a multitude of threats and remain compliant, a simplified and robust IT network that can maintain a high-level of security whilst delivering an enhanced user experience is essential.
Because platformisation enables holistic network visibility and supports agile application development, it is becoming an ever-popular solution across the financial landscape. The philosophy of combining all resources under one digital platform ensures the harmonious relationship between compliance and financial innovation, safeguarding the future of digital banking.
