Your Real IT Budget Is Bigger Than The Line Item
On The P&L
For CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and CFOs at US banks, credit unions, insurers, and fintechs.
McKinsey → Banking spends
6–12% of revenue on technology.
The highest of any industry.
Deloitte → The true TCO of legacy cores runs 3.4× what gets reported.
The gap is hiding in your marketing budget, your compliance remediation line, and your deposit attrition numbers, and it compounds every quarter you defer.
This is the 30-minute read that puts a number on it. Worksheet included. Board-ready math.
What Legacy Systems Are Really Costing US Financial Institutions in 2026:
34 pages · 30-minute read · Includes the Cost-of-Standing-Still Worksheet
The Four Things You'll Walk Away With:
The Five Hidden Costs of Legacy Systems
Maintenance inflation, delayed delivery, regulatory exposure, talent concentration, and customer attrition quantified with current data from McKinsey, Deloitte, IBM, OCC, NCUA, and Cornerstone.
The Modernization Priority Matrix
A ranked, opinionated breakdown of which system layer to modernize first — channel, fraud/AML, integration, data, or core — with 3-year cost-of-inaction ranges by institution size.
The Cost-of-Standing-Still Worksheet
A six-line formula that turns "we should probably do something about this" into a single dollar figure suitable for the front page of a board case.
The 90-Day Proof-of-Value Playbook
What a bounded modernization pilot actually looks like — including the seven questions to ask any vendor (Devsu included) before signing.
The Numbers That Forced This Ebook
Stat 01
6× collapse in incumbent advantage. Only 4% of new US checking applicants now pick their
existing bank without shopping (down from 25% in 2018).
Stat 02
$10.22M average cost of a US financial-services data breach in 2025
Stat 03
~10% per year retirement rate of the COBOL engineer cohort. Fewer than 2,000 new entrants
worldwide in 2024.
Stat 04
45+ cease-and-desist orders issued by US federal banking regulators to non-G-SIBs between
June 2023 and June 2024, a meaningful share citing IT controls.
Do nothing vs.
take a risk.
Take the risk of action vs.
take the risk of inaction.
Most institutions, after running the math in Section 3, conclude inaction is the larger risk.
The ebook will tell you whether that's true for you. A 30-minute conversation with our engineering leadership will tell you what to do about it.
About Devsu
Devsu is an AI-Native Engineering Partner for complex software ecosystems, specializing in Media and Advertising with clients including Deutsch, Doner, Fox Corporation, and PlutoTV. Powered by 250+ technologists and proprietary AI-powered recruitment across 40,000+ LATAM profiles, we reduce structural engineering risk and enable confident, scalable acceleration.
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