Banks have real-time transaction data, but customer understanding still arrives in batches. Insurers have digital portals, but policy systems interpret context days later. Automotive OEMs stream telemetry, but commercial models respond quarterly. Energy firms collect live consumption signals, but service logic moves at legacy cadence.

Digital transformation delivered capabilities. It did not deliver coherence. And coherence - the ability for systems to understand context and act in the moment - is the new competitive frontier.

Modernising technology is not the same as modernising how the enterprise thinks.

— Martin Citron, Head of Integration, Trask

The architecture rap: Systems modernised vertically, value emerges horizontally

The first era of digital focused on modernising components: new CRM here, core upgrade there, data lake next quarter. Each system became faster, cleaner, more scalable – in isolation. But the value in today’s economy does not live in systems. It lives in the flow between them.

A payment becomes insight when it informs credit behaviour, fraud posture and insurance need immediately, not after ETL. A driving pattern becomes value when underwriting, customer experience and risk prevention adjust together – not in silos.
A customer event becomes service only when back-office, identity, product and communication engines respond as one system. Modernisation without connection is just expensive isolation.

Decision latency: The cost of slow understanding

The limiting factor today isn’t technology capability – it is decision latency.

Decision latency = the time between a real-world signal and the organisation’s response to it

Every hour of latency has an economic cost:

• lost conversion opportunity

• higher fraud exposure

• worse risk pricing

• lower customer trust

• operational inefficiency

• regulatory vulnerability (because explainability decays with delay)

This is the difference between “digital access” and real-time financial intelligence.

Legacy systems are rarely the true bottleneck. The bottleneck is the time it takes meaning to move across the organisation.

— Martin Citron, Head of Integration, Trask

Proof across industries: Integrating before replacing works

The companies breaking this barrier did not start by replacing their cores.
They started by connecting intelligence around them.

In banking, Moneta shifted from traditional CRM cycles to real-time engagement by building an event-streaming backbone with AWS Managed Kafka and Flink, orchestrated by SAS RTDM. A travel purchase triggers an insurance offer within seconds – not because the core changed, but because context circulates instantly. Conversion rises. Cost per campaign falls. Time-to-market becomes hours, not months. Read more

In insurance, Vienna Insurance Group deployed unified API management and real-time integration services above a stable core. A new self-service portal now synchronises customer, policy and document data securely and consistently – with Kubernetes scaling and WSO2 governance ensuring discipline. What a “Big bang”. Read more

Pattern:
Systems didn’t get ripped out. They learned to speak the same decision language.

A new operating model: Enterprise as a real-time network

This is the real evolution: the enterprise stops acting like a stack and starts acting like a network of awareness.

Three architectural shifts define leaders:

From storage → to circulation

(data at rest → data in motion where needed)

From systems thinking → to flow thinking

(optimising components → optimising interaction)

From integration projects → to integration capability

(one-off links → persistent connective tissue)

When that happens, the business gains something more valuable than modern tech: contextual intelligence in real time. That is what makes “digital” measurable.

Why this matters now

Industries are merging at their edges: finance with mobility, mobility with energy, identity with commerce, insurance with behaviour.

Winning organisations will not be defined by the newest platform. They will be defined by how little friction exists between a signal and a decision.

Modernisation gives components. Connection gives cognition. And cognition - not cloud count, not number of APIs, not AI pilots - is the currency of the next decade.

This is what Trask builds

We don’t “do integration”. We build enterprise cognition infrastructure — the architecture that allows systems, data and decisions to operate as one intelligent fabric:

• legacy stays reliable

• modern services move fast

• signals don't wait

• security and governance are consistent

• business logic runs once, not ten times

The result is not a digital stack. It is a connected, thinking organisation capable of acting in real time. Not because everything is new - but because everything finally works together. Connected intelligence isn’t technology. It’s how modern enterprises think. A new core can wait. A connected mind cannot.

[.infobox][.infobox-heading]What to remember[.infobox-heading]Modern tech ≠ a modern enterprise. The real advantage now is low decision latency – the speed at which signals become coordinated action across systems. Enterprises don’t win by replacing everything. They win by connecting what they have so it thinks as one. Modernisation builds capability. Connection creates intelligence. [.infobox]

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