The antitrust regulator of Italy announced on Thursday that it had instructed the largest bank in the nation, Intesa Sanpaolo (ISP.MI), to suspend the scheduled transfer of 2.4 million clients to its new mobile-only service, Isybank.

With this decision, Intesa has suffered another setback in its efforts to modernize its digital infrastructure and progressively transition away from its traditional information technology systems in favor of cloud technology.

The antitrust regulator AGCM issued a statement stating, “In this way, account holders will be put in the condition of choosing whether to keep their account with Intesa Sanpaolo… or shift to Isybank.”

An attempt to contact Intesa for a comment was not immediately successful. At the beginning of this month, the authority initiated an investigation into how Intesa was moving customers to Isybank. This was in response to many complaints, which the watchdog stated had now surpassed 5,000.

Individuals expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that they had not been able to notice the communication from Intesa regarding the migration in time to opt out of Isybank since it had arrived in the digital mailbox of their current accounts during August.

In addition, users of Intesa were dissatisfied since they could no longer generate a one-time credit card number from their account to make purchases online more securely.

Isybank’s Chief Executive Officer, Antonio Valitutti, stated in a recent interview with a publication that “virtual payment cards” of this kind will soon be made accessible to Isybank customers.

Four million Intesa clients under 65 only use their financial services remotely, and Isybank is targeting them. By the end of 2025, it intends to acquire one million additional consumers.

The organization has plans to transfer an additional 2.4 million Intesa account users at the beginning of 2024. In October, they moved the first 300,000 account holders.

Isybank, a mobile bank that is cloud-based and offers minimal fees, is a crucial component of Intesa CEO Carlo Messina’s long-term strategy to survive competition from fintech and concentrate Intesa on more lucrative industries like wealth management and insurance.

The transition of bank services onto a cloud platform is a significant barrier for mainstream banks, which have an IT infrastructure that is not only obsolete but also frequently made unmanageable due to the overlap of multiple systems resulting from bank mergers.