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Bank Technology Landscape Baseline: Rationalizing Platforms, Vendors, and Integration Debt

Current-state artifacts that turn “what we have” into an examiner- and board-usable reference point for change

InformationFebruary 8, 2026

Reviewed by

Ahmed AbbasAhmed Abbas

At a Glance

Establishing a technology landscape baseline maps platforms, vendors, interfaces, and technical debt to expose complexity, risk, and cost drivers, enabling banks to rationalize vendors, retire redundancies, and prioritize modernization aligned to strategic outcomes.

Why the “technology landscape baseline” is no longer an IT inventory

In 2026, banks increasingly treat the technology landscape baseline as a governed, locked reference set for how digital services are actually delivered: platforms in production, their dependencies, the control environment that keeps them safe, and the evidence required to explain change. This is a shift from the traditional “application inventory” mindset. A list of systems does not reveal operational constraints, audit exposure, or the true ability to deliver strategic ambitions at pace.

As advanced capabilities move from innovation labs into core infrastructure, the baseline must capture more than technology names. It must capture the operating reality: which components are composable and reusable, which platforms still impose monolithic coupling, where critical services rely on vendor ecosystems, and where control evidence is mature enough to support accelerated delivery without compounding resilience and compliance risk.

What a 2026 baseline should contain as “current-state artifacts”

To be decision-grade, the baseline should be execution-ready: understandable across technology, risk, and finance, and durable enough to serve as the reference point for future change decisions.

1) Platform and service inventory, not just applications

Modern baselines distinguish platforms (core banking, payments, identity, data, integration) from the services they expose and the business journeys they enable. This helps executives see where strategy depends on scalable shared capabilities versus fragile point solutions. It also supports rationalization decisions because the baseline can reveal duplicated services and hidden integration costs.

2) Dependency mapping and critical service views

A baseline that cannot show dependencies will not protect modernization. Banks increasingly document critical services and map them to technology components, third parties, and operational procedures. This creates a traceable line from customer outcomes to platform constraints, which is essential for operational resilience and for avoiding “functional gaps” during incremental modernization.

3) Reference architectures that reflect composable modernization

Leading banks are moving away from “big-bang” rewrites and toward composable modernization: modular rollouts, reusable components, and API-first integration patterns. Baseline artifacts should capture the reference architecture choices that make this possible (for example, the separation of ledger functions from product and channel logic) and the standards that govern interoperability and message consistency.

4) Control evidence attached to the landscape

Current-state documentation becomes strategically valuable when control evidence is anchored to the same map. Identity and access patterns, logging and monitoring coverage, vulnerability management practices, incident response runbooks, and third-party oversight artifacts should be traceable to the platforms and services they govern. This reduces the risk that transformation accelerates delivery while leaving control effectiveness behind.

5) Change history and versioned decisions

Because many banks now deliver continuously, the baseline must include versioned architecture and configuration decisions: what changed, why, who approved it, and what risk controls were verified. This is the bridge between strategic intent and safe execution, and it is frequently the difference between “we believe we are secure” and “we can prove it.”

2026 landscape shifts that must be represented in the baseline

Core banking modernization is becoming modular and cloud-native

Core banking is increasingly framed as a platform “hub” that supports real-time updates across channels, with modern implementations emphasizing modularity and API-led integration. A baseline should therefore document which parts of the core are still monolithic, which have been separated into services, and where the bank relies on vendor platforms versus in-house components.

Agentic AI is moving from experimentation into production workflows

Across the industry, AI is progressing from copilots to more autonomous, task-completing agents in areas such as servicing, operations, and risk. As this shift accelerates, governance frameworks and registries of AI use cases are becoming baseline requirements, particularly where systems influence customer outcomes, financial decisions, or monitoring and investigations. Baseline artifacts need to show where AI is used, what data it relies on, how it is monitored, and how changes are controlled.

Open banking is expanding into open finance and monetized APIs

As banks embed services into third-party ecosystems, APIs are becoming products. Baselining must therefore include API catalogs, consent and data-sharing controls, resilience expectations for partner dependencies, and evidence of how interoperability standards are applied across channels and jurisdictions.

“Invisible payments” is a systems and controls problem, not a channel feature

Real-time and orchestrated payment experiences increasingly depend on routing across wallets, accounts, and alternative rails. A credible baseline documents the orchestration layer, reconciliation and exception handling, fraud controls, and how settlement finality is assured. Without this, banks risk creating fast experiences that are operationally brittle.

Zero trust and authenticity controls are moving into the default design

Security in 2026 is increasingly built around continuous verification: identity, device posture, and access context are evaluated for each request. Banks are also responding to synthetic media threats with identity assurance and content authenticity measures. Baselining should capture these controls as part of the landscape, not as separate security program documents, because they shape where workloads can run and how channels can be expanded safely.

How executives use the baseline to validate strategic ambitions

A technology landscape baseline supports strategy validation when it makes constraints explicit. Executives can test whether ambitions depend on platforms that cannot scale, control environments that are uneven, or third-party dependencies that increase resilience exposure. It also improves prioritization by highlighting where “run” spend is driven by duplication and complexity, and where modernization will free capacity through decommissioning rather than add new layers.

Most importantly, the baseline provides an objective reference point for sequencing: which capabilities can be industrialized now, which require foundational uplift first, and where the bank should slow change to avoid compounding operational and regulatory risk.

Establishing an objective baseline to test strategy realism

Objective baselining becomes materially stronger when the bank evaluates not only what is documented, but whether the documentation is usable for decision-making: dependency transparency, evidence quality, governance traceability, and the ability to reconstruct “what was in force” during incidents and audits. A digital maturity assessment can be used to score these dimensions against the bank’s current-state artifacts and operating realities, producing a clearer view of readiness and sequencing under the stated strategy validation intent.

Within that approach, the DUNNIXER Digital Maturity Assessment can be applied to assess whether the technology landscape baseline is sufficiently execution-ready to support prioritized change. When dimensions such as governance effectiveness, platform coherence, control evidence quality, and third-party dependency management are evaluated against the baseline artifact set, leaders can more confidently test whether strategic ambitions are achievable with current capabilities and constraints.

Related Briefs

Reviewed by

Ahmed Abbas
Ahmed Abbas

The Founder & CEO of DUNNIXER and a former IBM Executive Architect with 26+ years in IT strategy and solution architecture. He has led architecture teams across the Middle East & Africa and globally, and also served as a Strategy Director (contract) at EY-Parthenon. Ahmed is an inventor with multiple US patents and an IBM-published author, and he works with CIOs, CDOs, CTOs, and Heads of Digital to replace conflicting transformation narratives with an evidence-based digital maturity baseline, peer benchmark, and prioritized 12–18 month roadmap—delivered consulting-led and platform-powered for repeatability and speed to decision, including an executive/board-ready readout. He writes about digital maturity, benchmarking, application portfolio rationalization, and how leaders prioritize digital and AI investments.

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