Genz ©Created by JThemes.com
Modern banking IT landscapes are complex beasts—an evolving mix of legacy mainframes, cloud services, SaaS vendors, regulatory systems, and sprawling on-prem infrastructure. As financial institutions chase digital transformation, what often gets left behind is a coherent strategy for technology governance.
Frameworks like FinOps, DevOps, SRE, ITSM, ITAM, SAM, TBM, TOGAF, and ITIL exist to manage this sprawl. Some are tactical—focused on uptime, cost, and compliance. Others are strategic—driving innovation, agility, and business value. But in banking, these frameworks often evolve in silos: IT builds one, Ops adopts another, Risk brings in a third. The result? Disconnected priorities, duplicated data, and missed opportunities.
Why It Matters in Banking
Take a Tier 1 bank managing thousands of internal apps. Legacy COBOL systems run alongside microservices on AWS. Teams in different regions adopt their own tools to track usage and costs. One team runs ITIL, another builds SRE practices. Meanwhile, compliance demands constant reporting.
This fragmentation causes pain:
- Cost misallocation: Without unified FinOps, cloud costs are hard to attribute—leading to overprovisioning or undercharging.
- Redundant tooling: Multiple CMDBs, monitoring platforms, and asset management tools coexist without integration.
- Misaligned metrics: Uptime is tracked in one system; cost efficiency in another. No single view connects these to business KPIs like loan origination speed or fraud detection accuracy.
Real-World Example: Strategic vs Tactical
Tactical Governance:
A large bank uses ITSM (ServiceNow) to streamline incident response times. It hits its SLA targets and reduces outages. Good win—but it doesn’t ask why these outages happen or how infrastructure decisions tie to business outcomes.
Strategic Governance:
Contrast this with ING Group’s approach to DevOps and architecture. ING empowered “BusDevOps” squads—combining business, development, and operations in cross-functional teams. Architecture is guided by business value, not just compliance. Trade-offs are made deliberately, aligning technical debt with strategic flexibility. This is closer to a strategic governance model, with architecture acting as the connecting tissue.
Federated Governance: What Works in Banking
Centralized governance sounds ideal—until regional regulatory teams block global rollouts. On the other hand, letting each country or product team run its own tooling creates silos. The most successful banks adopt a federated model:
- Standardize where possible: Shared platforms for cost data (e.g., CloudHealth, Apptio for FinOps/TBM) allow global transparency.
- Decentralize where necessary: Local architecture boards decide how to meet goals based on local systems, but they operate under shared principles.
- Shared governance playbooks: For instance, HSBC implemented global architecture principles tied to business value, but empowered regional teams to execute based on local context.
Leadership: Where’s the Single Threaded Owner?
Banks need strong architectural leadership—not just governance councils. Architecture must drive decision-making through principles like Werner Vogels’ Frugal Architect:
- Cost is a non-functional requirement.
- Trade-offs must be explicit.
- Continuous measurement is mandatory.
This approach could mean rejecting a “cool” new analytics platform if it doesn’t materially impact customer value or increase operational efficiency. For example, a regional bank in the U.S. saved millions by rationalizing duplicative risk platforms under architectural guidance rather than compliance mandates.
Getting Started: Practical Steps for Banks
- Do a governance gap analysis
Map out the frameworks currently in use (FinOps, ITIL, etc.) and the data they generate. Identify where metrics overlap, diverge, or conflict.- 🔧 Tool: Apptio TBM Unified Model
- 🔧 Tool: ServiceNow CMDB Best Practices & Audits
- Prioritize based on value loss
Identify areas where fragmentation hurts your business the most—whether it’s increased operational risk, low transparency in cloud spend, or inefficiencies in IT support. - Start before budget season
Effective governance improvements should influence annual budgets, not follow them. Start planning governance initiatives in Q2 or Q3 to shape fiscal planning. - Embed architecture into business planning
Every major IT investment should go through architectural review with clear documentation of trade-offs and value impact.- 📚 Framework: AWS Well-Architected Framework
- 🎥 Talk: Werner Vogels on the Frugal Architect (YouTube)
- Iterate outside of fiscal cycles
Tech governance shouldn’t be a once-a-year exercise. Treat it like software—continuous and responsive.- 📘 Guide: The Phoenix Project – A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- 🌐 Ongoing Resource: FinOps Foundation – Framework & Community
Useful Resources for Bank Tech Leaders
📈 Banking Technology Stack Insights – McKinsey & BCG Industry Reports
👉 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services
👉 https://www.bcg.com/industries/financial-institutions
🧠 Frugal Architect by Werner Vogels
👉 https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/
📊 Apptio TBM Resources
👉 https://www.apptio.com/blog/
☁️ Cloud FinOps Framework
👉 https://www.finops.org/framework/
📘 The Phoenix Project – A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
👉 https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/
🏛️ TOGAF and Financial Services – Open Group Whitepapers
👉 https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf-standard
🔍 SRE at Scale in Finance – Talks & Slides from Google SREcon
👉 https://srecon.usenix.org/
(look for Goldman Sachs, Capital One, and Citi SRE presentations)
Final Take
There’s no off-the-shelf solution to governance in banking IT. But success doesn’t come from piling on more tools or tightening central control. It comes from orchestrating the frameworks you already have, investing in architectural leadership, and aligning everything to real business value.
It’s not easy—but it’s necessary. And those who get it right will be the ones who innovate faster, manage risk better, and create lasting competitive advantage.
