Your Software's Maker Has Set the Date. The Plan Can Still Be Yours.

A letter arrives from the maker of your loan system. The version you run reaches end of support next year. You can move to their newer product, or pay for extended support.

Moving looks large, and nobody has budgeted for it. Extended support looks small beside it. It is approved in one meeting.

A year later the same letter arrives. The system is exactly as it was. The decision is made the same way.

What We Found

We looked at two things: what the public record says about firms whose software reaches its end date, and how the decision to stay or leave is usually made.

The date is not yours, and it can be final. A group of more than 40 credit unions, with 150 branches and 300,000 members, shared one core system. It was “heavily customized”. Its vendor scheduled it to sunset in August 2024. The institutions did not choose that date and could not move it. Replacing the system meant rebuilding more than 200 screens and more than 500 interfaces to other systems.

Extended support exists, and it has its own end date. Makers often sell time beyond the end of standard support. Standard support for IBM i version 7.4 ended on 30 September 2026; a paid extension runs to 30 September 2029. That is three more years, and then the same decision with less room.

The regulator does not accept “we are paying to stay” as an answer. The RBI’s direction says regulated entities “shall avoid using outdated and unsupported hardware or software”. Extended support can keep fixes arriving for a while. It does not make an old system part of a plan.

The comparison is usually unfair. The decision sets one year of staying against the whole cost of leaving. One year always looks smaller. The renewals are never added up, and the cost of leaving does not fall while you wait.

The Half of the Decision Nobody Prices

The maker’s letter offers two prices: the renewal and the upgrade. Two other numbers decide the question, and neither is in the letter.

The cost of staying. It is more than the renewal. It includes the exceptions the security team renews with it, the controls checked by hand around a system that cannot take current tools, and the audit finding that comes back each year. It also includes the risk the regulator has named. In April 2024 the RBI barred Kotak Mahindra Bank from taking new customers online and issuing new credit cards for about ten months, with IT inventory and patch and change management among the areas it cited. For those months the cost of the old arrangements was measured in customers.

What leaving opens up. A system on software that is still supported can be changed, connected and built on. The new product, the partner connection, the faster payment option: plans like these wait on a system the firm can change without adding to its risk register. One industry survey published in September 2026 reported that 52% of financial institutions named legacy technology as an obstacle to modernising real-time payments (the survey did not state its sample size).

This is our reading of the evidence. It is not a measured market figure, and we do not put a rupee value on it here. That figure has to come from your own business.

Four Ways to Answer the Maker’s Letter, Weighed

Option	When it fits	What it risks
Renew extended support each year	A retirement, merger or replacement already has a firm date	The system stands still while the renewals add up, and the option ends on the maker’s date
Move to the maker’s newer product	The business still fits the product, and the custom rules are few	Years of customisation must fit the new version or be rebuilt. The move often turns into a replacement
Buy a different packaged product	The need is standard and a product already covers it	Everything moves at once. The firm’s own rules must fit the product or be dropped
Use the time being paid for to leave in stages	The system is old, customised and built around the business	Two systems run side by side for a time. The work runs over several stages, not one quarter

Where You Are Now, and Where You Should Be

Before the next renewal is signed, we would set a benchmark for the decision itself.

Measure	Typical starting point	Where it should be	How it is checked
The cost of staying	The renewal fee, and nothing else	The renewal, the exceptions, the manual controls and the open finding, in one place	The cost comparison
The cost of leaving	One large figure, never broken down	A price for each stage	The staged plan and quote
Whose date the plan follows	The maker’s	The firm’s own, set before the maker’s	The staged plan
What each year of support buys	The same system, one year older	Fewer parts on the old version at the end of each year	The count, reported at each renewal
The size of one commitment	The whole replacement, or nothing	One stage, with the freedom to pause after any accepted module	The staged plan
What the decision covers	The renewal against the upgrade	The cost of staying, the cost of leaving, and what leaving opens up	The board paper

The starting points above are what we expect to find. In an engagement they are replaced by your own position, taken in the first review. The targets are what we would work towards with you. They are not results we have already achieved for a lender.

How We Work With You

1. We listen: a free Reliability Review. A first conversation about the system, the maker’s letter, and the plans that are waiting on the decision. You leave with a short written note of what we found.
2. We research. We research your sector, the regulator’s position and what the public record says about firms in your situation. This article is an example of that work.
3. We read the system and propose: the Legacy System Specification Assessment. It produces a written specification of what the system does, a risk register, a cost comparison between keeping and replacing the system, and a staged plan with a fixed quote. AI does a first pass, our senior engineers review it and trace it to the code, and your own experts confirm it. Code access is read-only and logged, never used for training, and deleted within 30 days of the evaluation ending unless we engage. You get the options and our recommendation.
4. If you approve, we build. We replace a system one module at a time while the old one keeps running. We never do a single cutover. The work is billed by milestone, each milestone tied to a module you accept, and you can pause after any accepted module.
5. We review against the benchmark. Before work starts we set the benchmark. After each module we show you where each measure stands, and the filled-in benchmark is yours at the end.

The Review is free. Every paid step is fixed price, agreed at scoping. Stop after any step. The findings are yours. The assessment fee is credited in full against the first build stage if it starts within 90 days of the report.

What you need to bring: a budget for the assessment, approved separately from the renewal; read-only access to the code once the assessment begins; and a few hours from the people who know the system.

What changes for the business:

Role	What they gain
CEO	The firm leaves on a timetable it chose. Growth plans are not tied to a supplier’s calendar.
CTO or CIO	The team moves onto technology that is still supported and that people can be hired for, without a forced rush.
CFO	The cost of staying set beside the cost of leaving, a price for each stage, and spending that comes to an end.
CISO	Fewer components nobody fixes after every stage, and fewer exceptions to renew.
Risk and compliance	Something to show at each review: what has moved, what remains and what comes next.

The cases in this article, and what IOanyT does about that kind of problem:

The case	What IOanyT does
A group of more than 40 credit unions had their shared core system retired by its vendor on the vendor’s date.	Our staged plan lets a firm start leaving while it is still covered, one module at a time, on dates it sets.
The RBI restricted Kotak Mahindra Bank for about ten months, citing IT inventory and patch and change management among other areas.	Our assessment sets the cost of keeping a system beside the cost of replacing it. Taking a plan to the regulator is the firm’s own job.

IOanyT is a consultancy with its own engineering team: we study the problem, recommend, and prove it by building only what you approve. The maker sets its date; the plan for leaving can be yours.

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