EXCLUSIVE- “Legacy” is a bit of dirty word when it comes to banking innovation, but some companies, like Microsoft, are set to challenge that.

“At Microsoft for 43 years we’ve had an amazing legacy, an amazing platform, an amazing set of performance,” Toni Townes Whitley, corporate vice president, industry, for Microsoft said during an Innotribe presentation at the Sibos conference currently taking place in Toronto, Canada. “So how do we create a space for innovation?”

For Microsoft, Whitley said, it starts with a cross-industry approach. In other words, learning to innovate in an area like financial services requires lessons taken from projects in other areas (like a growing e-commerce retailer, an elevator company, or a brewery, all examples brought up during Whitley’s talk).

This approach seems to be working quite well for Microsoft, especially in financial services, where services like its cloud-based blockchain platform, Azure, are becoming the backbone for more and more innovative projects. But will this approach work for legacy banks?

Yes, Whitley said, but banks have to surmount a few problems to begin, starting first with the amount of money that’s actually spent on innovation at a bank.

“What we’ve learned on financial services innovation is a very small part of your budget is actually earmarked for innovation…Most of the IT spend is about feeding the beast, the basic platform and legacy kinds of applications and infrastructure that you have,” Whitley said.

The trick to making that small percentage (typically about 10% of spend, according to Microsoft) innovative. Like most other attendees at Sibos, that trick , according to Whitley, is data.

This was echoed by Saket Sharma, managing director and CIO, treasury services at The Bank of New York Mellon.

“Oftentimes we look at innovation outside, sometimes innovation is within your own hose, and the perfect example is data,” Saket said. “Financial services, if everyone looks into their own organization, are we really capitalizing on the data that we have? To me, that’s the first fundamental thing we can do as an organization.”