IBM today announced a new solution to help banks renovate their back-office systems and compete more effectively in the emerging "on demand" world. The new Core Systems Transformation solution (CST) represents a $140 million investment by IBM. It is a comprehensive portfolio of transaction processing platforms and services from IBM, which allow banks to migrate their back-office systems to modern Internet architectures in a phased, risk-minimizing manner. The move comes at a time when banks worldwide are grappling with aging back-office systems that are hampering bankers as they seek to improve service to customers, deliver new products, manage costs and strengthen risk controls in today's competitive and increasingly global banking environment. Banks' "back-office" or "core-banking" systems are the mission-critical systems that process data and transactions for mortgages, loans and deposits.