Igor Feitoza, a Brazilian-born entrepreneur, left an angry message on his bank’s Facebook page this week.

不久前的某日，巴西出生的企业家伊戈尔费托萨(Igor Feitoza)在其银行的Facebook页面上留下一条愤愤不平的留言。

“I want to see if you guys will pay my overdue bills and my employees as I can’t access my money which last Friday to pay them,” he wrote following a “ridiculous” three hours spent at the bank.

他写道：“我上周五刚存的钱，准备支付账单和员工的工资，结果现在却没法取钱。我倒要看看，你们会不会支付我的过期账单和员工工资。”在此之前，他在这家银行耗费了“荒唐的”三个小时。

Mr Feitoza is not one of the many frustrated Royal Bank of Scotland customers hit by the latest technology failure this week. He is a client of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country’s biggest bank by market capitalisation, which had its reputation as one of the most digitally advanced lenders tarnished by an outage in its payment and online systems late last week.

费托萨并不是那周受到苏格兰皇家银行(RBS)技术故障打击的众多不满客户之一，而是澳大利亚市值最大的银行——澳大利亚联邦银行(Commonwealth Bank of Australia，简称CBA)的客户。该行号称数字化程度最高的银行之一，但那周发生的支付和在线系统故障给这一名声蒙上阴影。

As well as provoking outbursts on social media, the technology glitches at RBS, which caused some 600,000 payments and direct debits to go missing, and CBA underline how the world’s biggest banks are often failing to get to grips with the growing demands being placed on their IT platforms.

RBS和CBA发生的技术故障除了在社交媒体上引发大量吐槽以外，还凸显出这样一个现实：全球最大银行经常搞不定其IT平台承受的越来越高的要求。RBS的技术故障竟然导致大约60万笔支付和直接扣账交易不知去向。

Banks spent about $188bn on IT last year and that figure is expected to grow at close to 5 per cent a year, taking it above $200bn by next year, according to Celent, the research company.

研究公司Celent的数据显示，各银行去年的信息技术支出大约为1880亿美元，预计这一数字会以每年近5%的速度递增，明年将达到2000亿美元以上。

Many banks, such as RBS, are plagued by computer systems that have been built up over several decades through acquisitions and new product launches to form a costly and complex patchwork of systems.

像RBS这样的许多银行，受到几十年期间逐渐积累的电脑系统的困扰，这些系统可能来自并购，也可能来自新产品推出，它们构成了一个成本高昂的复杂的系统大杂烩。

“A lot of these programmes get three-quarters done,” says a senior technology executive at one of the largest US banks. “It’s one of these technical debt problems that builds up over the course of time. If you have one thing happen it might cause the whole thing to fall down.”

美国最大银行之一的一名技术高管表示：“此类程序有许多只能执行四分之三的功能。这就是那种技术‘债务’，它们随着时间的推移而不断积累。一旦出点什么问题，会导致整个系统崩溃。”

The cost of maintaining these often ageing and unwieldy systems eats up three-quarters of banks’ IT spending, according to Celent. That leaves only a quarter to spend on innovations to keep up with the rapidly emerging threat from the many technology groups and start-ups trying to steal market share in areas such as payments.

据Celent介绍，这些往往老化而不听话的系统的维护成本消耗了银行IT支出的四分之三。也就是说，只有四分之一的支出被投入创新技术，以应对正在迅速出现的来自众多高科技集团和初创企业的威胁，后者试图在支付等领域窃取银行的市场份额。

“For a sector that spends significantly more on technology than most other sectors in the world, it is the least innovative, so there is a paradox here,” says Bill Michaels, head of financial services in Europe at KPMG.

毕马威(KPMG)欧洲金融服务部门主管比尔迈克尔(Bill Michael)表示：“对于一个技术设备上投入显著超过世界上其他多数产业的行业，这是最缺乏创新精神的做法。所以说这里存在一个矛盾。”

As many banks struggle in the post-financial crisis environment to generate returns above their cost of capital, these spiralling costs and inefficiencies are becoming increasingly unacceptable to both managers and shareholders.

由于很多银行在金融危机后的环境中难以获得高于资金成本的回报，不论对银行管理人员还是股东来说，这些扶摇直上的成本和低效率正变得越来越不可接受。

RBS, which last year paid a record fine to regulators for a bigger systems outage in 2012, hoped to solve its problems by replacing its core processing engine at a cost of 750m. But in a recent interview, chief executive Ross McEwanconceded there was still a big job to reduce the number of systems and applications at RBS from more than 3,000.

去年，RBS曾因2012年一次更大规模的系统瘫痪，向监管机构支付了创纪录的罚金。该行曾希望投入7.5亿英镑更换其核心处理引擎，以便彻底解决问题。然而，在最近一次访谈中，该行首席执行官罗斯麦克尤恩(Ross McEwan)承认，要把RBS系统和应用软件的数量从3000余个降下来，还需要做很多工作。

Asian banks spend more than Europeans or US rivals on IT; their spending is growing faster; and more of their IT money is going on new projects than on maintenance. However, they are hardly glitch-free.

亚洲的银行投入信息技术的资源高于欧美竞争对手。它们的支出增长更快，而且它们的信息技术支出有更大一部分投向新项目，而不是用于维护旧系统。然而，它们也很难做到零故障运营。

In January, a problem in the system linking accounts at Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the country’s largest lender, with securities brokerages, disrupted Rmb4.9bn in fund transfers, affecting nearly 55,000 customers at 90 brokerages.

今年1月，链接中国工商银行(ICBC)账户与券商账户的一个系统发生故障，导致49亿元人民币的资金转移中断，影响90家券商的近5.5万用户。工行是中国最大的银行。

As regulators make ever growing demands on banks to provide them with vast amounts of data covering areas from stress tests to anti-money laundering checks, banks are racing to keep their systems up to speed.

随着监管机构对银行提出越来越高的要求，让银行提交海量数据（涵盖从压力测试到反洗钱检查的方方面面），各银行正竞相确保各自的系统跟得上。

Deutsche Bank insiders blamed its failure in this year’s US stress test on years of under-investment in IT that made it unable to meet US regulators’ demands.

德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)的内部人士将该行今年在美国压力测试中“不及格”归咎于多年来对信息技术投资不足，导致该行达不到美国监管机构的要求。

Concern is growing about cyber security after high-profile hacking attacks, such as last year’s theft of data on 76m customers from computer systems at JPMorgan Chase.

在出现多起备受关注的黑客攻击事件之后，人们对网络安全的关注日益提高。去年，曾有7600万客户的资料从摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)的电脑系统中失窃，这是黑客攻击的一个事例。

Executives say this focus on cyber security is a catalyst for change, pushing banks to simplify and upgrade their IT systems. “Making something secure requires it to be consistent and clean and up to date and well managed,” says the US tech executive.

高管们表示，对网络安全的这种关注是推动变革的催化剂，它迫使银行简化和升级其IT系统。上述美国技术高管表示：“要确保安全，就需要做到一致、干净、及时更新至最新状态，并得到优良的管理。”

James O’Neill, senior analyst at Celent, predicts that within a decade most big banks will have switched from using costly mainframe computers for overnight processing of customer data to using much more flexible cloud-based services.

Celent资深分析师詹姆斯攠尼尔(James O'Neill)预计，十年内，多数大银行将从使用成本高昂的大型计算机对客户数据进行隔夜处理，转向使用灵活得多的云端服务。

If nothing else, the shortage of developers trained in the Cobol programming language that drives most bank mainframes will force them to make the switch. Australia’s CBA has moved to a cloud-based system, while Deutsche recently outsourced many of its applications to a cloud provider.

即使没有其他推动力，受过COBOL语言训练的开发人员的短缺也将迫使银行完成这一转型。COBOL语言目前驱动着多数银行大型计算机。澳大利亚的CBA银行已转向一种基于云技术的系统，而德意志银行最近也将许多应用程序外包给一家云计算服务提供商。

“The story about legacy systems impeding innovation is a bit oversold,” says Mr O’Neill. “I’m not saying they will go on for ever, but they have done a pretty decent job of supplying new products and services.”

奥尼尔表示：“遗留系统阻碍创新的报道有点言过其实。我并没有说它们会永远运行下去，而是说它们在提供新产品和服务方面做得还不错。”

Like many sectors, however, banks are realising the need to harness the power of “big data” to offer better digital services to their customers.

不过，和许多行业一样，银行正在认识到需要利用“大数据”的威力，为客户提供更好的数字化服务。

Mr Michael at KPMG says his banking clients know the stakes are high. “They have seen what technology has done to music and home shopping and so far they have been relatively slow to adapt — but the longer they wait the harder it will get.”

毕马威的迈克尔表示，他的银行客户知道这方面的工作事关重大。“他们看到了技术在音乐和家庭购物领域的威力。迄今他们的适应相对缓慢，但他们等待的时间越长，就越难完成这一调整。”