Banks at a critical technology crossroads 

58 per cent of financial services leaders report that their current cloud environment evolved by accident rather than by design. This finding comes from Kyndryl’s Financial Services Readiness Report. In the Nordics, banks are accelerating their digital transformation to unlock greater efficiency, resilience, and customer value.  

“Transitioning to new systems is a major undertaking, and institutions may be struggling when trying to do too much transformation at once,” says Sara Ramakers, CEO of Samlink, a Kyndryl owned company providing secure managed services for complex banking environments.

Three dynamics dominate technology transformation. First, legacy infrastructures are aging and threaten the day-to-day services and readiness. Second, regulatory alignment remains non-negotiable. Third, market evolutions force banks to reduce operational expenses, decommissioning certain services, while improving agility.

Investment has in some cases favored front-office capabilities, leaving back-office systems underfunded. This imbalance may result in sizeable technology debt.

Modernizing core platforms is essential to enable variable cost models and accelerate innovation. Contemporary architectures help in simplifying integration, strengthen partnerships and shorten time to market.

Modernization spans accounts, payments and lending. Success depends on cloud enablement, optimized applications, AI driven operations, and API-first architectures.

“The intelligent approach is incremental and modular,” Ramakers notes. “Critical steps of manageable size at a sustainable pace helps in delivering cost-efficiencies without disruption.”

AI comes to aid

Artificial intelligence adds urgency. Kyndryl research shows 88 per cent of financial services leaders expect AI to reshape roles within a year, yet 61 per cent struggle to keep pace.

“Working in financial services will require AI fluency,” Ramakers says. “Continuous reading and learning should become a disciplined daily routine.”

Agentic AI has transformative capability. It works autonomously, you define the goal, and for instance, it will figure out how to resolve issues, define policies and analyze risk scenarios. Its potential lies in reducing time to outcome, generating efficiencies and creating competitive advantage.

Banks can deploy agentic AI tools to automate vendor risk assessment, implement continuous control monitoring, and complement traditionally labor-intensive functions like ensuring compliance with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering regulations. Agentic AI will begin to transform banking in 2026 while keeping humans in the loop. But what can future-ready leaders in finance do to stay ahead of the curve?

Technology alone is insufficient. Kyndryl’s People Readiness Report shows that 95 per cent of organizations already use AI in some capacity, yet 71 per cent of leaders say their workforce is not prepared to leverage it effectively.

“Successful AI adoption demands collaboration skills, workforce engagement and a clear change management strategy,” Ramakers points out. “Strong leadership is key to guide and coach the team through this change and transformation.”

Road to resilience

Cybersecurity remains a defining concern. According to Kyndryl data, 78 per cent of financial services leaders report a cyber-related outage in the past year.

For European and Nordic banks, EU regulations like DORA provide a framework to boost their cyber resiliency and mitigate security risks from increasingly complex cyber attacks, and society expects financial institutions to be both trustworthy and resilient. Operational resilience is critical.

Customers demand uninterrupted digital banking services as the sector is working on mainframe modernization projects or shifting from one system to another or to cloud platforms. The transition could introduce new risks.

“A major challenge is to manage risk without stifling innovation,” Ramakers says.

“Speed without security is dangerous, security without speed leads to stagnation. The balance is essential.”

For Nordic banks, the opportunity to enhance resilience is based on thinking how to reduce technology debt in a smart way and by embedding security and adopting AI intelligently.

The question is not whether to modernize, but how to do so without compromising innovation, customer’s trust or competitiveness.