"We just have a lot of legacy systems out there, " said Frances Coppola, a former RBS employee and an independent banking analyst.

BBC: A woman stands at a cash machine

Masaharu Miyachi, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, says that Japanese companies continued to pour money into mainframe-based systems until well into the late 1990s.

ECONOMIST: IT in Japan

Cisco Systems could see an impact on financial results from the ongoing weakness in IT demand in Europe, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu warned this morning, as he trimmed his estimates for the company and cut his price target.

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