I am, however reminded that historicaly, banks weren't lock or safemakers, they were banks. Lock-pickers & safecrackers had quite a few wins, but different specialist industries evolved to deal with that. The banks didn't start becoming safemakers or lock inventors, they stuck to their banking. Probably a good thing.

Strangely in the digital daze we live in, when the art of digital lock & safe making requires vastly more wizard's magic than a simple mechanical device with a finite number of parts all controlled by the the maker, banks dash out & enter the lockmaking & safe business.  Diversifying? Banking is still banking.

Legacy systems are a bit of a struggle in a networked world, both accessing them & securing them from uninvited access, but even the latest & greatest are full of unknown-known & known-unknown holes & banks can hardly provide their customers with privacy, let alone security. Then there is the benign NSA, poking more holes & wandering about at will & that doesn't make your business or customers safer.

Basically there is no financial security or privacy, in the banking system, or even the transaction system, is there? Neither is there any guarantee any financial institution could even provide any services to their customers, because in a networked world, all of a bank's branches can be effectively closed without visiting even one. That is why you need a plan. It could happen at any time.

While there are vast offerings of digital banking 'products' they all suffer from the same flaws by using the same processes, even back to the legacy back-end still running in the bank. Using the same networks, or even more, running on the same systems, creating even more holes into the bank's back-end.

Sure, half a century ago some tech was adopted by most banks that is still 'shared' today, but its old, & it too follows the same path to constant flaws & weaknesses, always unpredictable, no matter what your risk guy says. Time for a next step, with all the stakeholder's rights in mind, ie privacy, security.

It seems to me that 'banks', as a whole, need to get back to banking, but they can only do that if they can ditch the infinite number of digital monkeys they've invited onto their backs & come up with what their customers deserve & will demand; an exchange system which is inherently private & has real-time measurable, quantifiable, manageable security.

There was a time when governments didn't interfere with the communications between a banker & their customer. The world didn't end, it advanced rapidly, for a time.

At the moment it just doesn't seem that banks are living up to their names.

Now that is where you really need a plan.