1. Business and IT in big banks are both extremely complex. Business just because of regulations making everything difficult and because the business people have had centuries of time to come up with complicated schemes on how to make money and/or serve customers in a competitive way. IT because paying off tech debt is not something that banks do for the most part.
2. IT in banks is often old and undocumented, making deep modifications very hard and risky.
3. Big banks are parts of the country's (or, in case of biggest banks, world's) critical infrastructure. Hence, they're REALLY risk averse. I.e. if Google Ad words goes down, the the only impact is that people's browsers around the world start running faster without all the ads... If the bank's transactional system goes down (or worse, transfers money where it shouldn't go), then the whole social order is at risk.
There are other industries that are similar - are also old, complex and critical - like for example the utilities, but unlike banks they don't make money off of people's private data like the banks do, so they don't transfer customer's details back and forth between their systems - so the GDPR impact is much lesser.
1. Business and IT in big banks are both extremely complex. Business just because of regulations making everything difficult and because the business people have had centuries of time to come up with complicated schemes on how to make money and/or serve customers in a competitive way. IT because paying off tech debt is not something that banks do for the most part.
2. IT in banks is often old and undocumented, making deep modifications very hard and risky.
3. Big banks are parts of the country's (or, in case of biggest banks, world's) critical infrastructure. Hence, they're REALLY risk averse. I.e. if Google Ad words goes down, the the only impact is that people's browsers around the world start running faster without all the ads... If the bank's transactional system goes down (or worse, transfers money where it shouldn't go), then the whole social order is at risk.
There are other industries that are similar - are also old, complex and critical - like for example the utilities, but unlike banks they don't make money off of people's private data like the banks do, so they don't transfer customer's details back and forth between their systems - so the GDPR impact is much lesser.