Technology & Infrastructure

Its role in the system

The digital infrastructure on which money runs: the overwhelming majority of it is records in the systems of banks, payment networks and depositories. Technology companies and IT teams keep those systems switched on, defend them against attacks and change the way financial services are built and delivered — from mobile banking to blockchain.

Functions

1. Core banking and processing — the systems that keep accounts, accrue interest and process payments (Temenos, FIS, Oracle FLEXCUBE, the cloud-native Thought Machine, or in-house builds); at insurers and funds — policy administration and asset accounting systems.
2. Cybersecurity and anti-fraud — protection against attacks, standards for card data (PCI DSS), detection of fraudulent transactions in real time.
3. Cloud and infrastructure — moving systems into the cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), fault tolerance, backup data centres.
4. Data, AI and ML — credit scoring, fraud detection, personalisation, back-office automation, generative AI in customer service; since the end of 2025 the payment networks have been opening their rails to AI agents that complete a purchase on a person's behalf (Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay).
5. RegTech and SupTech — automation of compliance (KYC, transaction monitoring, reporting) inside institutions, and analytical tools for the regulators themselves.

What makes it special

• How it earns: software licences and subscriptions (SaaS), transaction fees, implementation and support. For a financial institution IT is one of the largest cost lines and at the same time a source of advantage over competitors.
• The legacy problem: many large banks still run on systems written decades ago (mainframes, COBOL). Replacing them is like changing an aircraft engine in flight, so migrations take years and often end in outages; some banks are instead moving the core into the cloud step by step. 🇯🇵 Japan is the extreme case: bank cores still live on mainframes, and dozens of regional banks share one contractor's platform — NTT DATA has run its joint centre for regional banks on its own BeSTA core since 2004 and only plans to move it into its own cloud by 2028. Mizuho showed the price of a mistake: after switching to the new MINORI system the bank went through eight failures during 2021 — ATMs swallowed cards, branches stopped serving customers — and the FSA issued business improvement orders.
• The supplier under supervision, and concentration risk: technology companies usually hold no financial licences, but regulators require institutions to control their suppliers. In the 🇪🇺, DORA has applied since 17 January 2025 — digital resilience rules for the financial sector that also introduced direct oversight of critical IT providers, cloud providers among them. The reason is simple: if thousands of institutions run on one cloud or with one vendor, an outage or a breach there hits the whole system at once.
• 🇨🇳 China: finance inside a super-app: everyday payments run through two super-apps — Ant's Alipay and WeChat Pay — and the platforms themselves rest on home-grown technology: the distributed database OceanBase, built inside Ant and spun off into a separate company in 2024. It is precisely that weight that made the authorities force big tech's financial businesses to operate under banking rules: in July 2023 Ant was fined around seven billion yuan, and with that the regulators declared the sector's "rectification" complete. The model is instructive: technology here does not serve the bank from outside — it becomes the place where people keep their money and pay.
• Blockchain and distributed ledgers (DLT): the idea is simple — instead of every party keeping its own record and then reconciling it with the others, everyone works from one shared ledger, and a smart contract executes the terms automatically: transferring the asset and paying for it become a single action, and reconciliation disappears. Tokenisation is the same bond, fund unit or bank deposit held as an entry in such a ledger. What genuinely works: 🇨🇭 Switzerland has given banks a wholesale digital franc for settling digital bonds on the SDX exchange since the end of 2023 (the pilot runs to at least mid-2027), J.P. Morgan runs tokenised deposits in Kinexys, and the 🇺🇸 GENIUS Act (July 2025) and 🇪🇺 MiCA put stablecoins under rules with full reserving. What does not: the 🇪🇺 DLT Pilot Regime has applied since March 2023, yet by mid-2025 only three infrastructures had been authorised — ESMA blames the lack of access to central bank money, weak interoperability with ordinary systems and caps that are too tight.
• Open banking: with the customer's consent, a bank must open access to their account to other licensed services through an API — to show the balance and statement (account information) or to initiate a payment without a card. The customer gives and withdraws the consent, and the third-party service holds its own licence and supervisor. 🇪🇺 the rules were set by PSD2 (since 2018) together with strong customer authentication; next come PSD3 and the PSR regulation, agreed in 2026 and applying in 2027–2028, while the FiDA regulation on access to wider financial data is still being negotiated. 🇬🇧 the model was imposed: after an order from the competition authority the largest banks opened their APIs, and in 2025 that produced 351 million payments and 16.5 million user connections (not unique people). 🇺🇸 the rule on personal financial data rights was adopted in October 2024, but a court blocked its enforcement and the agency is rewriting it — a rule on paper rather than in practice.

Why it matters

When technology fails, money "disappears" from the screens: clients cannot pay, banks cannot process transactions, and a coding error or a cyberattack inflicts enormous losses within minutes and undermines trust in the institution.

Links to other zones · 16

• Anti-Money LaunderingRegTech is one of the largest markets for technology firms: transaction monitoring (rule scenarios plus machine-learning scoring), sanctions and PEP screening, remote identification with liveness detection (eKYC), perpetual KYC and blockchain analytics all serve the Anti-Money Laundering zone. Banks and fintechs buy these systems as a service instead of building them, though the licensed institution remains answerable to the regulator; supervisors and FIUs build mirror-image tools for themselves (SupTech).
• Audit & AssuranceA provider in Technology & Infrastructure faces two checks: Audit & Assurance issues its SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports, and supervisors now reach it directly — the EU named its first critical ICT providers under DORA in November 2025, the UK its first critical third parties in July 2026.
• Banking & Credit InstitutionsCore banking, mobile apps, scoring and fraud detection from Technology & Infrastructure make modern Banking & Credit Institutions largely IT companies with a licence.
• Card networksTechnology & Infrastructure carries Card networks: processing, card-number tokenisation, real-time fraud scoring and PCI DSS compliance — the network is only as reliable as these systems.
• Clearing & settlementTechnology & Infrastructure decides how reliable Clearing & settlement can be: the business runs on thin margins and enormous volumes, so the winners are those whose systems survive peak days without stopping.
• Consulting & AdvisoryTechnology & Infrastructure reaches its users through Consulting & Advisory: IT consultancies and systems integrators roll the platforms out together with the vendors.
• Credit InformationCredit Information is one of the biggest buyers from Technology & Infrastructure — data pipelines, machine learning for scoring, open banking APIs, fraud platforms and security for credit history databases.
• Crypto / DigitalTechnology & Infrastructure supplies Crypto / Digital with blockchain infrastructure, smart contract audits and on-chain analytics.
• Digital paymentsTechnology & Infrastructure supplies what Digital payments and open banking actually run on — APIs, cloud capacity and anti-fraud systems.
• Exchanges & platformsTechnology & Infrastructure supplies Exchanges & platforms with trading systems, algorithmic and high-frequency execution, and server colocation next to the matching engine.
• Financial Market InfrastructureTrading systems, securities recordkeeping, tokenisation and the clouds they all run on fall under the Financial Market Infrastructure zone: critical IT providers to exchanges and CCPs are now covered by operational-resilience rules (🇪🇺 DORA), and solutions that do not fit the existing rulebook can be tested legally in a regulatory sandbox or under 🇪🇺 the DLT Pilot Regime — with a restricted authorisation, caps on customers and volumes, and reporting to the regulator.
• Financial Media & DataTechnology & Infrastructure is what Financial Media & Data is made of: low-latency price feeds, cloud storage and AI for processing news and alternative datasets are built by engineering teams.
• InsuranceTechnology & Infrastructure is changing the core of Insurance: models price risk from telemetry and satellite imagery, and online distribution turns a policy into something bought in a minute and compared just as fast.
• Interbank systemsInterbank systems are the most demanding client of Technology & Infrastructure: an RTGS outage halts payments across a whole country, so continuity and redundancy requirements here are the strictest in the industry.
• International transfersTechnology & Infrastructure sets the speed and safety of International transfers: real-time sanctions screening, the ISO 20022 standard and hardening of the SWIFT terminals a bank connects through.
• Regulation & SupervisionTechnology & Infrastructure sits inside the perimeter of Regulation & Supervision: digital resilience and outsourcing rules (🇪🇺 DORA) and oversight of IT risk at licensed firms.

Careers in this zone · 7

All zones of the Atlas

• Clearing & settlement
• Exchanges & platforms
• Retail access
• Banking & Credit Institutions
• Corporations & Corporate Finance
• Development Banks
• Investment & Pension Funds
• Anti-Money Laundering
• Fiscal Policy
• Financial Market Infrastructure
• Monetary Policy
• Regulation & Supervision
• Households & Individuals
• Insurance
• Commodities market
• Crypto / Digital
• Debt market
• Derivatives
• Stock market
• FX market
• Real estate market
• Card networks
• Crypto / CBDC
• Digital payments
• Interbank systems
• International transfers
• Sovereign Wealth Funds
• State Insurance & Guarantees
• Audit & Assurance
• Consulting & Advisory
• Credit Information
• Education & Certification
• Financial Media & Data
• Ratings & Indices