Securing the future of digital banking

In this interview, Vicenç Benages, Director at Axians Spain, leading the Banking & Insurance Business Units, shares his perspective on the key challenges facing banks today and how Axians helps them strengthen security, resilience, and digital service availability.

 

Banks need to modernize quickly, but they also need to stay secure. From your experience, what are the main challenges banks face today? Could you share a concrete example?

One of the main challenges banks face today is ensuring the availability of their applications, especially as they move toward hybrid cloud environments. Security remains essential, but availability has become just as critical. For a bank, having its online banking or mobile services unavailable can quickly become a reputational issue.

This is also reinforced by European regulatory frameworks such as DORA and NIS2, which place greater emphasis on digital operational resilience, continuity of critical services, incident response, and the management of ICT and third-party risks.

At the same time, banks must modernize without disrupting legacy core systems while meeting increasingly stringent requirements for operational resilience, cybersecurity, and third-party risk management.

A relevant example is a temporary disruption affecting digital banking services at a major financial institution. Although the incident was limited in duration, it demonstrated how quickly service availability can become a reputational and customer experience issue. Following this type of incident, banks typically review their network, application delivery, and data center infrastructure to reduce operational risk and strengthen resilience.

 

When it comes to securing digital customer environments, what are the biggest risks for financial institutions? Can you give us a use case showing how Axians helps address them?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)  is becoming one of the biggest challenges for financial institutions. Banks are starting to adopt AI because the market is moving quickly, but many are still defining how to govern and manage it securely.

The risk is not only external attacks but also internal usage. Employees may use AI tools without the organization’s full oversight, creating potential exposure of confidential or sensitive data. This is similar to the early days of cloud adoption, when shadow IT created new governance challenges.

This makes data governance, traceability, and clear usage policies essential, especially when AI is applied to customer data, fraud detection, or internal productivity tools.

Axians helps banks structure and secure these environments by supporting governance, usage control, lifecycle management, and data protection. The goal is to enable financial institutions to benefit from AI while keeping security, compliance, and confidentiality under control.

 

Business continuity and service availability are critical in banking. How does Axians help banks keep services running smoothly and securely? Do you have an example of a project or situation where this was especially important?

Axians supports banks by strengthening the infrastructure layers that keep critical services available, including data centers, enterprise networking, and application delivery.

For example, Axians worked with one of Spain’s leading banks to implement an application delivery layer based on load-balancing technologies. This helps ensure that customers can continue accessing online banking services reliably, even across complex environments with multiple data centers.

For banks, this type of architecture is essential because service availability directly impacts customer experience and trust.

 

Looking ahead, what do you think will be the next priorities for banks in terms of security, resilience, and customer experience? How do you see Axians supporting that future?

The next priorities for banks will continue to be security, resilience, and customer experience. AI will play a growing role, both as an opportunity and as a new area of risk that must be governed carefully.

Another key challenge will be reducing operational complexity. Banks manage extensive infrastructures spanning hybrid cloud, data centers, legacy platforms, third-party providers, and numerous online services. Axians helps simplify and modernize these environments, improve visibility, and support more efficient operations.

Observability, automation, and real-time response capabilities are becoming increasingly important for detecting incidents earlier, reducing operational risk, and protecting the digital customer experience.

By combining expertise in networking, data centers, cloud, cybersecurity, and application delivery, Axians helps banks build secure, resilient, and high-performing digital services while enhancing the customer experience.