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ScienceSoft’s Practices to Maximize Financial Software Longevity

Delivering custom BFSI software since 2005, ScienceSoft knows first-hand the common pitfalls that can shorten the useful life of financial systems. Our approach to building robust financial software that stays relevant for 10+ years is based on the following:

- Prioritizing modular architectures for scalability and easy evolution.

- Using secure and updatable tech stack components.

- Applying the API-first approach for enhanced software interoperability.

How to Maximize Financial Software Longevity
How to Maximize Financial Software Longevity

Can Modern Software Repeat the 40-Year Longevity of Legacy Financial Tools?

Back in the day, BFSI software design was focused primarily on reliability. Many solutions succeeded in that regard: 43% of US banks still retain 40-year-old systems built on COBOL. However, faultless performance is not the only reason why incumbents stick to their heritage systems. The rigid monolithic nature and the sheer volumes of stored data make revamping legacy software extremely risky and costly.

Newer financial techs powered by cloud, API, AI/ML, and blockchain haven’t yet had a chance to showcase their durability to the same extent. While it’s comparatively flexible, scalable, and interoperable, modern software heavily depends on constantly evolving third-party services and frameworks. Hence, it tends to accumulate technical debt way faster than the old-school tools. Quick aging, ongoing fragmented changes, and uncertain regulations for emerging techs are the top concerns related to the longevity and TCO of new BFSI solutions.

ScienceSoft’s Head of Business Analysis and Banking IT Consultant

At ScienceSoft, we understand that new software may stay with you for decades, so we aim to build a solution that will be scalable and flexible enough to accommodate the needs you can’t yet predict with certainty. When you commit to your next financial software, you should, in fact, be able to use it for another 10, 20, or 40 years; the difference is, you shouldn’t have to commit to a monolithic program that can’t be meaningfully changed. Instead, you can commit to a system that’s built explicitly to be changed yet retain its integrity.

5 Pitfalls Hampering Financial Software Longevity — and How We Navigate Them

What hinders longevity

How we make it right

Feel the difference with ScienceSoft

Poor technical design

Short-sighted architectural and tech stack choices can restrain the capacity, scalability, and integration scope of financial software, introduce security vulnerabilities, and limit the solution’s potential to evolve. This may lead to frequent performance breakdowns as the business scales up or significant investments every time a change is needed.

ScienceSoft’s architects consider the client’s current requirements and future plans for the financial solution, as well as case-specific regulatory compliance frameworks, to pick the optimal architectural patterns and programming techs. We prioritize flexible modular architectures as a way to introduce scalable, easy-to-evolve software. Our teams avoid obsolete components and practices that may put software growth, security, and interoperability at risk.

Flawed software logic

Inadequate translation of the financial business rules into software logic may result in logic gaps and vulnerabilities. This leads to the flawed execution of finance automation rules, ultimately reducing the software's useful life.

Our experts analyze the workflows that the financial software will support and interview stakeholders to elicit granular requirements for the solution. Adopting test-driven development helps us improve the code mental model, business logic clarity, and overall solution usability while naturally increasing logic test coverage. Check our dedicated page to learn more about how we build financial software with accurate logic.

Convoluted code

Developers’ limited tech skills, subpar coding practices, and over-engineering may result in overly complex financial software code. Convoluted code is hard to maintain and modify, which complicates software evolution and may result in severe operational disruptions every time new features are added.

ScienceSoft’s engineers draw on their experience from 110+ financial software projects. They adhere to technology-specific code design patterns, style guides, and naming conventions to deliver highly maintainable and testable code. By using dynamic/static code analysis, pair programming, and peer reviews, our teams can spot flawed code fragments quicker and fix them before production.

Unreasonable hardcoding

 

Development teams with insufficient background in BFSI may fail to recognize variable financial values and data and opt to hardcode them. Some developers may also hardcode to speed up delivery. Modifying hardcoded financial parameters in working apps requires manual code recompilation, which is time- and effort-consuming.

We involve subject matter experts on the client’s side to review our assumptions regarding default financial software inputs and validate the prototyped formulas and automation rules at later project stages. This way, we can quickly adjust coding guidelines to prevent adaptability constraints, ensuring that the client’s non-IT teams can dynamically customize variable inputs.

Lack of documentation

Focusing too much on Agile ideals, developers may prioritize delivery speed over everything else and treat software documentation as an afterthought. Poor-quality and missing documents hamper effective financial software maintenance and evolution, leading to a higher TCO.

ScienceSoft’s teams collaborate closely throughout the project to deliver complete and consistent financial software documentation. Our approach to documentation is tailored to financial solution specifics, project needs, and our clients’ requirements. Visit our dedicated page to explore our documentation practices and see examples of documents we deliver at every SDLC stage.

8 Issues Caused by Poor Financial Software Longevity

Operational inefficiency

Aging financial software tools may hinder employee productivity, negatively affect data accuracy, and prolong service delivery (due to delays in new financial product launches, underwriting, billing, payment processing, etc.).

Eroded customer experience

Outdated digital customer experiences (old-fashioned UI design, lack of convenient self-service options and e-banking features, a large degree of manual routines, etc.) lead to reduced customer engagement and retention.

Data processing failures

The rigid scaling of legacy financial software computing and storage resources may evoke frequent failures during spike loads and performance bottlenecks as the volume of financial data and workflows grows.

Financial service downtimes

Lengthy adjustments of financial formulas, models, and document templates, as well as complicated functional evolution of financial software may result in BFSI workflow and service disruptions.

Limited innovation

Software non-compatibility with emerging fintech solutions and corporate tools of BFSI incumbents may restrain the ability to introduce innovative services (e.g., BNPL payments, parametric insurance) and customer experiences enabled by digital partnerships.

Overlooked fraud

Conventional fraud detection tools cannot recognize advanced financial fraud like AI-generated scams (e.g., deepfakes on face biometrics, cloned voices, forged documents) that impersonate financial employees and customers for illegitimate transactions.

Security risks

Heritage apps are vulnerable to emerging cyber threats like advanced persistent threats (APTs) that can exploit obsolete code to steal sensitive financial data while evading outdated detection mechanisms.

Compliance breaches

Legacy systems fail to provide compliance with evolving sectoral regulations (e.g., updated SEC, GLBA, NAIC, IFRS rules) and financial data protection standards (latest PCI DSS versions, new 3D Secure protocols, etc.).

How We Foster Longevity Throughout Financial Software Lifecycle

Here are ScienceSoft’s main activities to extend the useful life of BFSI solutions while optimizing capital investments and maintenance costs.

Step 1. Financial software inception

At this stage, we discover the client’s long-term goals and gather requirements for the financial solution. Here’s what it usually includes:

  • Interviewing project stakeholders to get a complete vision of the current operational needs, short-term goals, and long-term plans for the financial solution (e.g., adding functionality to support new digital service models later on).
  • Conducting interviews with specialists who will use the software (e.g., actuaries, underwriters, customer service agents) to elicit their challenges and expectations.
  • (for financial software products) Researching the market and target audience needs and defining the in-demand features to include in the solution.
  • (for existing software and systems in development) Analyzing the available software documentation.
  • Auditing our client’s financial IT infrastructure to understand its capabilities and limitations.
  • Determining global, region- and domain-specific regulatory compliance requirements.
  • Analyzing the regulatory frameworks of adjacent industry sectors and regions to leave room for potential software adaptation to new laws, e.g., concerning emerging techs like AI and blockchain.
  • Creating a list of functional and non-functional requirements for the financial solution.
  • Validating requirements with the client’s stakeholders to ensure their accuracy, clarity, and completeness.

ScienceSoft’s Lead Business Analyst and Insurance IT Consultant

Legacy software: rip and replace or keep and revamp?

In our projects, we usually design several alternative turnkey strategies for incremental modernization vs. complete replacement of legacy software. We detail the project scope, resources, cost and time estimates, and risks for each option. This way, our client can quickly compare the feasibility of possible approaches and pick the best match for its business priorities and constraints.

When you look at the costs of technical debt, retiring legacy tools and developing new ones from scratch may turn out to be cheaper than trying to keep and modernize them.

Step 2. Financial software design

At ScienceSoft, this stage involves a range of technical decisions that define the financial solution’s ability to scale and accommodate changes according to the changing business needs. This covers:

  • Designing an optimal feature set for the financial solution, including security and compliance features. We prioritize functionalities based on their importance to software sustainability and user adoption.

ScienceSoft's best practice: For fintech products, focusing on end-user value is crucial as it secures steady demand. By fostering a product-first mindset among development teams and flexibly addressing shifts in user preferences, we ensure our fintech clients get the right products capable of bringing long-term revenue. We prioritize Agile development methodologies to smoothly accommodate potential changes at late project stages without breaking the budget.

  • Designing the business logic, i.e., mapping the rules and constraints that will guide the system’s behavior. This step covers designing specialized logic components for finance automation, e.g., custom actuarial formulas, AI models for credit decisioning, blockchain smart contracts for parametric payouts, etc.
  • Defining the business logic components that can be reused across multiple features. Reusable logic contributes to software operational consistency and enables faster software evolution with minimized risks to the integrity of its underlying business rules.
  • Designing integrations (APIs, custom connectors, etc.) between financial software components and between the software and other systems.

ScienceSoft's best practice: Adopting the API-first approach, which implies designing APIs before other solution components, ensures easy financial software integration with third-party systems. The strategy is especially beneficial for fintech SaaS products targeting corporate customers and enterprise BFSI apps intended for multi-entity use.

  • Designing a scalable, flexible, and resilient architecture that will enable the smooth functioning and evolution of financial software. We rely on modular SOA, microservices, and serverless architectures that allow for separation of concerns (SoC) and component (logic, UI, database) decoupling. SoC makes it easier to reuse components across the financial app and allows for independent component development and maintenance, meaning that future upgrades and fixes can be rolled out quickly and without downtimes for the live app.

ScienceSoft’s Senior Solution & Integration Architect

Sometimes, the old monolithic architectures are still better for longevity and TCO

For example, in batch processing systems with defined logic and known transaction volumes, there may be little need for scaling and frequent changes. The main priority would be data integrity and operational consistency, and monolith is the champion when it comes to data coordination. Small BFSI apps with narrow, stable functional scope (e.g., expense tracking or recurring loan repayment) are another example of solutions where the benefits of microservices may not justify the added complexity. Also, a tightly coupled monolith would be the best choice for trading solutions that involve extremely low-latency operations.

  • Composing a reliable tech stack that will support accurate operations, security, and upgradeability of financial software. ScienceSoft employs low-code/no-code platforms where relevant to introduce agile financial solutions that can be easily customized by the client’s non-IT teams. Being technology-agnostic, we compare the offers of multiple technology providers to pick the techs that ensure the best cost-to-performance ratio.

ScienceSoft's best practice: If our client’s priority is to minimize dependency on third-party tech vendors, we go the opposite way and create fully custom financial solutions with proprietary low-code frameworks and plugins for convenient software evolution.

  • Designing human-centered UX and UI for role-specific financial apps. By prioritizing usability over trendy appearance, we ensure the aesthetics will not pose any risks to convenient user journeys and user adoption. Plus, in the long term, changing the app’s visual style according to the bank’s evolving brand book is less expensive than in-depth UX adjustments.

Step 3. Financial software development

  • This is the stage where we transform the approved design into financial software code, run the necessary testing, integration, and configuration procedures, and set the ready solution live. It includes:

  • Implementing DevOps (CI/CD, container orchestration, etc.). It helps eliminate manual errors throughout delivery, ensuring code integrity and minimizing regression risks.
  • Coding the financial solution’s back end and creating user interfaces using secure coding standards like OWASP ASVS. ScienceSoft’s financial software engineers apply standardized code design patterns like Singleton, Observer, Adapter, or Factory Method to improve the structure of the code, making it easier to understand and maintain.
  • Applying component-specific practices to drive longevity, for example:
    • Soft-coding financial values in actuarial, underwriting, accounting formulas and financial document templates.
    • Building asynchronous REST APIs to prevent API response delays when processing long-running requests like retrieving detailed account transaction histories or generating large financial reports.
    • (for AI-powered financial software) Setting up a scalable data processing framework and a high-capacity environment for continuous AI model retraining.
    • (for blockchain-based financial software) Developing proxy contracts to enable on-demand changes in financial smart contracts.
  • Testing the financial solution in parallel with development (may involve functional testing, usability testing, code vulnerability assessment, and more).
  • Establishing financial software integrations with the necessary systems and running integration tests to ensure smooth and secure data flows between the connected solutions.
  • Setting up and configuring a scalable and secure financial software infrastructure (cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid). We advocate for using cloud as a means of horizontally auto-scaling software capacities, which is critical for financial solutions with fluctuating demand, such as payment gateways or trading platforms.
  • Implementing financial software security mechanisms that have shown to be future-proof, like role-based access control, multi-factor user authentication, data encryption, and malicious activity detection. We make sure to leave the possibility to update mechanisms that are fast-evolving (e.g., encryption protocols, authentication methods, threat detection techniques) to stay protected against emerging cyber threats.
  • Implementing financial data backup and recovery mechanisms to prevent data losses and operational downtimes in case of failures or breaches.
  • Delivering all necessary technical documentation (documented source code with README files and comments, test reports, API documentation, a configuration guide, a maintenance guide, manuals for end users, etc.) to facilitate financial software maintenance and evolution.

ScienceSoft’s Senior Business Analyst and Financial IT Consultant

The focus on compliance must be retained at each development stage

The heavily regulated nature of the BFSI sector poses dynamic external risks to financial software under development, often rendering initial design choices irrelevant due to the financial firm’s changing needs. Throughout the project, we monitor evolving compliance rules and quickly enforce steps to mitigate longevity risks.

Step 4. Financial software maintenance and evolution

Here are the activities we commonly conduct during managed maintenance to ensure the relevance of financial software in the long run:

  • Continuous logging and monitoring of the financial software performance (tracking KPIs like throughput, latency, load, and spare capacity) and accuracy (e.g., via automated transaction logic checks and data cross-validation).
  • Financial software performance optimization, e.g., via load balancing among processing servers to improve availability or by optimizing financial database queries to minimize latency.
  • L1–L4 support to quickly handle emerging software and infrastructure issues and user inquiries.
  • Regular security and compliance assessments with reports on the revealed issues and recommendations on fixing vulnerabilities and bridging compliance gaps.
  • Monitoring user experiences with the financial app and collecting user feedback to run continuous app improvements in accordance with user expectations.
  • Continuous regression testing during financial software evolution to ensure that new and changed code pieces do not hamper solution performance and accuracy.
  • Regular codebase refactoring to handle potential post-release code smells (duplications, design inconsistencies, etc.) that may degrade financial app performance over time.
  • (for AI-powered financial software) Continuously fine-tuning AI model hyperparameters to improve model accuracy and meet evolving legal demands for AI explainability.

Step 5. Financial software modernization

ScienceSoft’s financial software revamp activities proved to help our BFSI clients extend the useful life of their digital solutions by 5–10 years on average.

  • Financial software migration to the cloud (rehosting, replatforming).
  • Financial solution rearchitecting (e.g., strangling the monolith architecture to microservices, decomposing UI into microfrontends) to make it more scalable, flexible, and integration-friendly.
  • Recoding financial apps built on legacy languages and platforms (e.g., PowerBuilder, COBOL, Delphi, VB) or aging languages (outdated .NET and Java versions) using modern programming techs.
  • Delivering new features to introduce consistent financial service automation and improve user experience (e.g., extend self-service options for insurance clients). We reuse the logic, UI, and database components of the existing financial solution whenever possible to avoid unnecessary development efforts.
  • Developing a strategy to address gaps in security and compliance measures and assisting with its implementation.
  • Remediating financial app accessibility issues (e.g., insufficient color contrasts, improperly labeled forms, no alternative text and transcripts for media files) to make the app convenient for users with disabilities.

ScienceSoft's best practice: We introduce changes to legacy financial software incrementally, taking time to conduct regression tests and make sure the adoption rate is sufficient. Our team usually runs deployments on holidays and weekends to prevent financial service downtimes.

Our Tech Stack to Build Durable Financial Software

Driving the Long-Term Value of BFSI Software: ScienceSoft’s Featured Success Stories

Our Clients Say

What stood out was ScienceSoft's proactive suggestions for cost-saving architecture design and tech stack solutions. Their input ensured we stayed within budget without compromising on software quality.

Ascendas Business Solutions

The guys really cared about the online payment solution they developed for my company and weren’t happy until they had it perfect. They asked the right questions and looked for ways to improve my idea.

ONE Technologies

What always set ScienceSoft apart is their resistance to mediocre results. Their early suggestions on optimizing the UX of BPM apps helped improve software usability and avoid costly code-level changes down the line.

Get Tailored BFSI Software That Will Remain Relevant for Years

A financial IT partner with 19 years of domain experience, ScienceSoft is ready to develop custom financial software or revamp your existing app to help you obtain a scalable, technologically flexible solution that can accommodate future changes.