Software development is an endless task - building an in-house...

Software development is an endless task - building an in-house front end on top of a legacy system is challenging and fraught with danger as there will always be many dependencies on the old legacy system. Even more challenging is replacing/redundafying the old system.

The best example of this and how expensive it can be is BT’s Panorama project. Market scuttlebug indicates a number somewhere between 600-900m - with that project based on an established and mature Swiss Private Banking system being the replacement technology and a massive IT team and specialist consultants. The wash out there was massive cost and time over-runs and delivery of a new system that cannot do as much or the same things the older legacy systems did. I have heard they may now even leave some of the older products open as they can’t be migrated.

Moral of this story IMO is that IT and technology changes are always highly challenging, expensive, and take far longer than anyone ever predicts or thinks. “Simply replacing the back-end” is never ever “simple” and trying to take the front end built onto one system and trying to use it on top of another system IMO is near on impossible economically wise.