5 takeaways from the Citrix financial services roundtable
At a recent Citrix roundtable in New York City, financial services technology leaders discussed how to strengthen resilience, simplify legacy environments, and maintain control as cloud and AI use grows.
What financial services leaders are prioritizing now
Financial services leaders have to protect customer trust, support digital operating models, and modernize legacy environments. At the roundtable, they discussed how to balance those priorities while keeping critical services running. Although the discussion focused on banking and other financial services organizations, many of the challenges also apply to insurers.
A Celent analyst joined the discussion, adding research context to participants’ experiences. Celent’s 2026 Dimensions research identifies security and operational resilience, along with legacy modernization, among corporate banks’ leading IT priorities for the next 18 months.
1. Resilience: Keeping the business running when disruption hits
Participants discussed what continuity means in a more connected operating environment. What happens when a digital channel, endpoint, identity service, application platform, or third-party provider becomes unavailable? How quickly can employees regain access? What will customers experience? Can critical business functions continue?
Several participants highlighted endpoints. They want devices that can be replaced or rebuilt quickly after a disruption. In practice, rebuilding endpoints can still take several hours or a full day, turning a technical recovery issue into a business continuity concern.
Resilience also shapes decisions about modernization, cloud architecture, endpoint strategy, vendor risk, and application access. Participants raised concerns about single points of failure and platform concentration, including the effect of outages in widely used cloud and desktop services.
2. Modernization: Simplifying legacy environments without adding complexity
Leaders discussed legacy systems, end-of-life platforms, and operating models that are harder to support as user expectations, security requirements, and business continuity demands evolve. The challenge is to simplify these environments without adding fragility, dependencies, or work for already stretched IT teams.
Leaders connected modernization directly to resilience. The business case is stronger when modernization reduces dependencies, improves recovery, and makes systems easier to manage. Fewer moving parts and faster response can provide a more dependable foundation for the business.
3. Control: Managing cloud, platform, and AI risk with confidence
Control was a recurring theme as leaders discussed cloud dependency, platform risk, and AI governance. Institutions need visibility into their environments, governance over access and usage, and clear accountability to meet their resilience, security, and regulatory expectations.
That means knowing where critical workloads run, who can access them, how to respond to a provider outage, and how to govern AI use in regulated workflows. Participants were interested in AI investment trends, but they also emphasized the need to match that investment with appropriate controls.
4. Access: Making users productive through more dynamic app delivery
One bank shared an example of reducing its persona model from roughly 190 personas to 14. That sparked a broader discussion about application access and operational simplicity. Overly granular, static persona models become difficult to maintain as roles, applications, entitlements, and work patterns change.
The discussion pointed toward more flexible application delivery for quantitative analysts, traders, branch teams, and operations staff. Better application inventories, clearer ownership, and onboarding that adapts to changing roles can help institutions update access without redesigning it each time needs change. Users gain faster access to the right applications, while IT can govern delivery more consistently.
5. Measurement: Proving the business value of fewer moving parts
Participants also discussed a measurement gap: complexity slows teams down and increases risk, but its business impact can be difficult to quantify. They called for better observability, clearer accountability, and stronger connections between technology investments and outcomes such as productivity, continuity, and customer experience.
Celent shared an example of an institution establishing internal service-level agreements for availability and assigning responsibility for addressing missed targets. Celent also described a relationship between availability and customer satisfaction scores. Connecting those measures can help leaders explain how technology performance affects the customer and employee experience. With limited budgets for growth, leaders need to show how reducing complexity and improving recovery support better business outcomes.
Keeping critical work moving through change
Institutions may follow different roadmaps, but participants shared common priorities: modernize without adding complexity, adopt cloud and AI while maintaining control, and keep the business running through disruption. Those priorities reflect Citrix’s focus on secure application access: helping institutions adapt while keeping critical work secure, available, and productive.
Citrix will continue bringing financial services and insurance technology leaders together for discussions like this. Talk to your Citrix account team about joining a future roundtable to compare approaches to resilience, modernization, AI governance, and application access.