It still amuses me that after more than three decades of working in banking and technology, the moment that finally pushed me to write a book was not a boardroom crisis, a regulatory incident or a failed go-live.
It was a flooded kitchen.
One ordinary weekday I found myself standing in a client meeting talking about hyper‑modular, coreless banking, while quietly panicking about whether water was seeping into the floorboards back home. A dishwasher, a bad decision with a delayed start and an old house with very little in the way of waterproofing turned into the kind of domestic mess you cannot ignore.
On the surface it looked manageable.
A wet floor,
a few towels,
a grumpy tradesman,
perhaps a new appliance.
But as we started to pull off kickboards and look behind the cabinets, the real story emerged. Warped MDF.
Damp plasterboard.
Mould appearing in places light never reaches.
The leak had not started that day. It had simply become visible.
You already know where this is going.
I realised that what I was living in my kitchen was exactly what I had been seeing for years inside banks. The visible incident is rarely the real problem. The real problem lives underneath, in the places nobody looks until something fails. The leak is just the moment when decades of avoidance finally show themselves.
Banks have their own versions of swollen MDF and hidden mould. The batch that always needs to be restarted. The manual reconciliation nobody quite understands. The “temporary” integration from ten years ago that quietly became the default route for critical data. The power user’s spreadsheet that is now, somehow, part of a regulatory report.
None of this appears in glossy strategy decks.
But it is real and it carries risk.
What the kitchen gave me was not a new set of ideas about banking. It gave me a way to talk about them. Core modernisation is dry, complicated and often wrapped in jargon. A flooded kitchen, on the other hand, is easy to understand. You do not need a PhD in architecture to know that if the floor is rotting, simply repainting the cabinets is a terrible idea.
That was the seed of the book.
I wanted to offer something that was honest about how bad things can get, but still practical about how to fix them. Not a magical framework that promises transformation in twelve weeks, but a method you can live with. A way to renovate while you are still living in the house, which is exactly what every bank has to do.
Nobody gets to shut the doors for two years and come back with a shiny new core.
I also wanted to write for the people who feel the weight of all this every day. The architects who know the real dependency map lives in their heads, not in any tool. The operations teams who sit in war rooms at two in the morning trying to restart a broken batch. The product owners who keep hearing “no” because somewhere deep in the stack there is a constraint nobody has the time or energy to fix.
You know the floor is damp.
You can smell it.
But nobody wants to rip up the tiles because they are afraid of what they will find.
The book is my attempt to pull that fear into the open and say, yes, it is bad in places. But there is a way forward that does not require jumping off a cliff and hoping the vendor’s PowerPoint had a parachute hidden on slide forty‑two. It is a path built around three simple ideas:
Blueprint,
Construct and
Harden.
Plan properly, build something real, then scale without destroying yourself in the process.
The flooded kitchen taught me something else. Once you have seen what is behind the cabinets, you cannot unsee it. You either live in denial or you do the hard work of renovation. Banks are at that same point now. The combination of legacy fragility, rising expectations, new competitors and regulatory pressure means the damp patches can no longer be explained away as “just a one‑off issue.”
So this post is really an invitation.
If you have ever looked at your technology estate and thought “we cannot keep going like this,” you are not alone. I have been in those rooms. I have stood in that kitchen. And I wrote the book for exactly that moment, when you realise that mopping is no longer a strategy.
If this story resonates, the book goes much deeper into how you move from crisis to a structured plan. But for now, I would encourage you to take one honest look at your own “kitchen” and ask a simple question.
Are you fixing the leak, or just hiding the damage?
My book “Rip Out The Core” will be published during the first half of 2026. Want to stay up to date on progress and timeline, then why not sign up for my newsletter?
