Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the Bank of England’s financial watchdog the Prudential Regulation Authority, has added his voice to those senior Bank of England officials warning that the UK banking sector needs to spend billions in the next few years to bring its IT systems up to date.

Bailey told The Independent newspaper the advent of online banking had exposed the weaknesses of many banks’ antiquated patchwork of IT systems.

He said the systems are now needing to perform in an agile customer-oriented world that they were not designed for.

The numerous UK banking IT systems failures in recent months and years have served to illustrate Bailey’s point.

Most recently in December, for example, RBS suffered a systems outage which left its customers unable to access their money on the busiest online shopping day of the year.

Said Tabet, head of governance risk and compliance strategy at EMC, said many systems were built for the first ‘mainframe’ platform of computing - or the client-server “second platform” of computing.

“The new ‘third platform’ of computing calls for far greater agility; responding to staff and consumer demands for access to data and services on the move, to call on data repositories to translate information into insight, to react in near-real-time to customer expectations as expressed on social media,” Tabet said.

Business leaders in financial institutions and the IT industry that serves them are only too aware of the problem, according to Tabet.

He called on financial institutions to consider how modern agile IT can drive new business opportunities and urged business leaders make IT a priority this year so that they can support the mobile, social, cloud-centric big-data-rich third platform of computing and meet customer and market demands.

“Technology is shaping our advances now more than ever, and it is time to invest in systems which will underpin your business as a whole for the future,” Tabet said.

“Avoiding short term CAPEX in the interest of cost savings could well result in long term losses and the eventual decline of any business.”

Tabet also called on regulators and national supervisors to take responsibility in developing adequate, standards-based frameworks in order for them to help stabilize the financial system of the next 20 to 50 years.