For banks and financial institutions, trust is the product and the network is its foundation, especially in an industry defined by real-time transactions, regulatory scrutiny and relentless customer expectations.
Customers may never see the infrastructure behind their interactions with financial services, but their confidence depends on it working flawlessly, with 80% of customers admitting they’d switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience.
For CIOs in banks and financial institutions, this creates a huge juggling act – managing expectations for digital speed and innovation, while ensuring outages, breaches or compliance failures do not occur.
“Banks can’t be stagnant – they have to keep evolving because both their customer’s expectations and the technology keep moving faster,” says Michael Connolly, Head of Global Strategic Accounts at Tata Communications.
Through its work with banks and financial institutions globally, Tata Communications has seen these pressures converge into a common set of challenges that are reshaping what technology leadership looks like in financial services.
From this work, four overarching forces have emerged that now define the CIO agenda. Collectively, these forces are known as SNAP:
- Simplification imperative
- Network as a strategic asset
- AI readiness
- Precedent-free leadership
These forces reflect how quickly CIOs are expected to respond to accelerating change. It will be those who harness these forces effectively who will be best positioned to protect trust, while enabling innovation at scale.
S – Simplification imperative
The first force is about simplification. Financial institutions now operate across sprawling hybrid environments, with multiple platforms, digital channels and applications.
“IT complexity is unavoidable as organizations embrace cloud, SaaS, APIs and AI”, says Michael Ruttledge, Chief Information Officer and Head of Enterprise Technology & Security at Citizens Bank. “But unmanaged complexity quickly becomes a drag on innovation. Standardization and automation are the antidotes to complexity.”
With this in mind, harnessing simplification is not about curbing ambition – it’s about reducing fragility. CIOs need to focus on consolidating architectures, improving visibility and simplifying how data flows between systems.
N – Network as a strategic asset
The network in financial services has also moved far beyond supporting internal operations. It now underpins everything from real-time payments to fraud detection. Performance issues are no longer just technical problems. They can disrupt liquidity, trigger compliance concerns or undermine customer trust in seconds.
As a result, “the network has come back around as a strategic priority,” continues Connolly. “Banks are pushing latency and now they’re pushing bandwidth as well, because AI is driving entirely new demands on the network.”
To harness the network, CIOs must prioritize ultra-low latency and resilient global connectivity to keep critical transactions reliable at scale.
A – AI readiness
In addition, AI is rapidly becoming embedded in financial services operations. From fraud detection and credit scoring, to personalized offers and compliance monitoring, AI-driven decisioning is moving closer to real time. These use cases demand fast, predictable access to data across distributed environments.
The ability to harness AI readiness depends on more than models alone. “Most organizations are early in their readiness for meaningful AI deployment, particularly from a data and digital infrastructure perspective”, states Shawn Dandridge, Global Head of Network and Telecom Infrastructure, Stewart Title. “While experimentation is common, many lack clean, well governed data, scalable platforms and integrated infrastructure needed to operationalize AI at scale. The biggest gaps tend to be data quality, cross system integration and the foundational architecture required to move from pilots to production.”
For financial institutions, AI readiness is inseparable from network intelligence, data locality and resilience.
P – Precedent-free leadership
Finally, in financial services, CIOs are operating in a leadership environment with no clear precedent. They are expected to modernize core platforms and adopt new capabilities at pace, while ensuring security, availability and regulatory compliance are never compromised.
Harnessing this force depends on how effectively CIOs align strategy, execution and partnership around business and risk outcomes, rather than pursuing innovation for its own sake.
“What financial institutions need from partners is consistency, global reach and straight talk,” says Connolly. “You do what you say you’re going to do – and when things happen and they will, you’re honest and you work through it together.”
This level of trust is critical in regulated, always-on financial environments, where CIOs must deliver resilience and stability at scale.
Turning the forces into competitive advantage
The pace of change in financial services will not slow. Simplification, network strategy, AI readiness and leadership are tightly interdependent and weaknesses in one area will quickly surface elsewhere. For financial services CIOs, the challenge is not whether to respond to these forces – but how effectively they can turn them into a source of competitive strength.
Tata Communications supports banks globally with secure, resilient connectivity, helping CIOs simplify complexity and strengthen always-on foundations.
