Financial Giants Revamp Mainframe Core for the Digital Age

HOUSTON – February 19, 2026 – As the global financial sector navigates a complex landscape of stringent regulations, fierce digital competition, and a looming talent shortage, a new wave of modernization is sweeping through its most critical infrastructure: the mainframe. Technology leader BMC announced collaborations with banking powerhouses Atruvia, NRB, and LINE Bank Taiwan, showcasing how targeted software solutions are enabling these institutions to transform their foundational systems, not by replacing them, but by revitalizing them for the modern era.

The partnerships highlight a crucial industry trend. Rather than undertaking risky and expensive migrations away from the systems that still process the vast majority of global card transactions, banks are strategically investing in tools that enhance mainframe performance, automate complex workflows, and improve the developer experience. The results include stronger regulatory compliance, greater operational resilience, and the agility needed to compete with nimble fintech challengers.

Banking's Digital Fortress: Meeting New Rules on Resilience

In Europe, the pressure to fortify IT infrastructure has intensified with the implementation of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). This sweeping EU regulation, which came into full force in 2025, mandates that financial entities prove they can withstand, respond to, and recover from all types of ICT-related disruptions. For institutions like Germany's Atruvia, which provides the IT backbone for over 670 cooperative banks and 91 million accounts, compliance is not just a legal requirement—it's a matter of national financial stability.

Facing the dual challenge of DORA and Germany’s own BaFin supervisory requirements, Atruvia identified a critical need to modernize its database recovery processes. The institution chose BMC AMI Recovery for Db2, a solution designed to automate and accelerate recovery while minimizing operational risk. A key factor in the decision was the software's ability to run parallel recovery simulations without disrupting live operations, a crucial feature for testing resilience under the new regulatory microscope.

"The banks' operations depend on our operations. Their resilience depends on our resilience," said Rüdiger Schmitt, System-Engineer and Product Owner for Db2-zOS at Atruvia AG. "By modernizing our database recovery capabilities, we support DORA and BAFIN rules, and we bring even greater resilience to banking in Germany."

Atruvia's move underscores a broader reality: for the 44 of the world's top 50 banks that still rely on mainframes, modernization is the most direct path to meeting the rigorous demands for risk management, incident reporting, and resilience testing that define the current regulatory environment.

Orchestrating the Future of Digital Banking

While European banks focus on shoring up their defenses, digital-native banks in Asia are leveraging modernization to accelerate innovation. LINE Bank Taiwan, the nation's leading purely online bank, faced the challenge of building a fast, reliable, and scalable platform from the ground up to serve its more than two million customers.

The bank's success hinges on its ability to flawlessly execute thousands of automated tasks daily, from account balancing to financial data analysis. To manage this complexity, LINE Bank implemented BMC's Control-M solution for application and data workflow orchestration. The platform now automates and manages over 5,000 job schedules, forming the operational core of its 24/7 digital services.

The impact has been significant. LINE Bank reports a 30% reduction in manual wait times, a 30% drop in manual work for cross-platform integration, and a 30% decrease in maintenance time when launching new products. This efficiency enabled the bank to become the first in Taiwan to offer nonstop US dollar currency exchange, a key differentiator in a competitive market.

"With Control-M we can run secure, stable, efficient processes, and we can flexibly integrate workflows across innovative new solutions, all while meeting the requirements of the financial industry," stated Leo Weng, CTO at LINE Bank Taiwan. He noted the bank's plan to leverage the platform for future integrations of cloud and AI solutions, highlighting how workflow orchestration is a bridge between legacy stability and future innovation.

Beyond the Code: Tackling the Mainframe Talent Crisis

Perhaps the most persistent challenge in the mainframe world is the human one. For decades, the industry has grappled with a skills gap, as veteran COBOL and systems programmers retire faster than new talent can be trained. Leading European IT service provider NRB confronted this issue head-on by prioritizing the developer experience.

NRB's strategy was to first modernize its software development processes before overhauling the applications themselves. By deploying BMC AMI DevX solutions, NRB provided its developers—especially younger ones—with a modern toolset that integrates with familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like VS Code. This shift transforms mainframe development from a niche, text-based discipline into a modern practice aligned with contemporary DevOps principles.

"We can now track every change and perform quick fallbacks in production," said Benoît Ebner, a system engineer at NRB. "We now have access to many statistics and KPIs that we didn't have before, which helps us identify areas for improvement."

This focus on improving the developer experience is critical for attracting and retaining talent. Independent research reinforces this approach, with studies showing that modern mainframe development tools can slash new hire onboarding time by 50% and dramatically increase developer productivity. By making mainframe programming more intuitive and efficient, companies like NRB are not just improving code delivery; they are ensuring the long-term viability of the workforce that manages the world's most critical financial transactions.

These cases collectively paint a clear picture of the mainframe's evolving role. Far from being a relic, it is an enduring and adaptable platform. Through strategic modernization focused on resilience, orchestration, and talent, financial institutions are ensuring their core systems are ready to meet the demands of a digital-first world.