Driven by the imperatives of modernizing unwieldy legacy systems and embracing a future in the cloud, financial services CIOs are breaking down their existing monolithic applications into small, manageable microservices that can be separated, independently migrated and scaled in a more flexible and efficient fashion.

However, the greater the number of microservices adopted, the higher the potential cost in terms of cloud and other operating expenses. How, then, to determine the `magic' number of microservices that delivers the optimal balance of performance and cost? How best to organize these microservices to achieve the greatest efficiencies, and in what order should services be isolated or removed - as part of a phased modernization roadmap - to cause the least disruption to the overall system?

Capco's proprietary methodology, customized to individual banks' unique legacy systems topography and powered by artificial intelligence that can scan millions of lines of legacy code in minutes, is the key to successful long-term, cost-efficient monolith refactoring and systems modernization.