In this recent article, Julian Farley, Sales Director for the UK and EU at BPC, an expert in the payments industry with nearly 25 years’ experience across solutions consulting, speaks to The Fintech Times on the economics of payments modernisation

Legacy technology rarely announces its retirement date. It continues processing transactions, reconciling files and keeping ATMs alive, which is precisely why banks postpone replacing it. The trouble is that “still working” and “still fit for purpose” are not the same thing. In payments, the gap between them has become a balance-sheet issue. Legacy infrastructure absorbs change budgets, slows product launches, fragments data and turns routine regulatory updates into bespoke engineering projects.

The hidden bill is often larger than the maintenance invoice. BPC’s Modernisation Without Disruption guide models a mid-sized issuer processing 10 million debit attempts each month. If avoidable false declines are only 0.50 percentage points, 50,000 legitimate transactions disappear. At an average transaction value of $30, that means $1.5 million of approved spend lost every month; for a European issuer, the guide takes optimistic numbers and estimates roughly $42,000 of annual interchange revenue lost before counting customer frustration, support costs or reduced card preference.

Europe has had repeated reminders that technology resilience is not theoretical. The UK Treasury Committee found at least 158 banking IT outages between January 2023 and February 2025, totalling more than 803 hours across major institutions. 5 million. In February 2025, the ECB ’s TARGET Services suffered a major incident after storage hardware failed, suspending payment and settlement processing for hours.

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