ETL usually involves moving data from one or more sources, making some changes, and then loading it into a new single destination. Traditional ETL platforms have been handling data following this ‘extract, transform and load’ model. That’s pretty straightforward. However, with the explosion of data and cloud adoption, they have been trying to expand their support to new data sources and data types and the cloud or hybrid environments prevalent today.

Imagine people logging on their bank account and presented not with their own bank accounts but with those of completely different customers. Imagine people seeing their life savings suddenly missing from their account. This is what happened in April 2018, when a series of outages led to the meltdown of TSB’s online banking system, costing the bank £366 million in ‘post-migration charges’ and a big loss of customers. A bill of £153 million was sent to Sabis, the bank’s IT provider, for its role in the crisis. The overall cost of the software failure could increase further if fines are subsequently imposed by regulators.

Data migration in core banking is all about the seamless mapping of entries, balances, P&L/balance sheet data, customer information and all other related data from the source to the target system. The actual value is in the data so effectively migrating as much of this as possible will help to reap the returns on the overall project. Forrester estimates that around 60% of banks around the world are already planning or performing a transformation project, therefore an accurate and timely migration is critical for ensuring effective core banking system deployment and decommissioning of the old legacy systems.