Absa spent most of its time leading up to Y2K consolidating as much of the combined infrastructures as possible into a single IT environment. This was necessary with its legacy of many different domains, computing infrastructures and security practices resulting from the 1992 mergers of Allied, Volkskas, United and Trustbank into Absa.

Fragmented legacy

While substantial progress was made during this time and the IT environment had stabilised, the bank`s non-retail operations` IT infrastructure was still fragmented, consisting of roughly 13 000 users split across 137 different domains.