One of the recurring themes in my work with banks (and covered in my book “Rip Out The Core”) is a strange split between how things look and how they actually work.
On the surface, many institutions now appear impressively digital.
Sleek mobile apps.
Polished web portals.
Chatbots that can at least say hello.
Yet when you scratch that surface, you find processes stitched together by email, manual uploads and brittle integrations that nobody really dares to touch.
It’s the difference between replacing the taps and replacing the pipes.
My kitchen taught me that if the plumbing is old, shiny fixtures are not a solution.
In banking, we have spent the better part of a decade learning the same lesson in slow motion. The pandemic only accelerated this. Almost overnight, digital channels became mandatory. Branch traffic collapsed, call centres were overwhelmed and the banks that coped best were the ones that had already invested in more than just new tiles on the front end.
Too many others responded with what I call façade digital. A new app on top of the same old middle and back office. The user experience improves a little. Maybe onboarding no longer involves a printer. But behind the glass, the same nightly batches run, the same manual handoffs happen and the same legacy constraints quietly dictate what is actually possible.
This is not a criticism of the teams who delivered those apps.
In many cases, they did remarkable work in impossible circumstances.
The problem is structural.
If your core systems were built for a world of branch forms and paper statements, they will always struggle in a world of real‑time notifications and embedded finance. You can make the façade look very modern, but the building behind it is still the same.
I often ask executives a simple question. If you turned off your mobile app tomorrow, how much of your operating model would actually change?
For some banks, the honest answer is “not much”
The app is a window onto a machine that still runs on overnight processing, end‑of‑day files and quarterly product releases.
That is façade digital in a sentence.
There is a risk here that goes beyond inconvenience. When the front end moves faster than the core, you start to see dangerous gaps.
Customers expect instant responses, but the back end cannot keep up.
Data gets out of sync.
Workarounds multiply.
Control processes that used to be simple and centralised become scattered and fragile.
At that point, you are not just hiding damp floorboards, you are actively weakening the structure.
The uncomfortable reality is that for many banks, the core is still closer to plumbing than to a platform. It was designed to be solid, reliable and frankly quite boring. That is not a bad thing. Money should not be exciting at the ledger level. But those systems were never meant to integrate with dozens of external partners, stream real‑time events or drive personalised experiences.
When we talk about “coreless” or “thin‑core” banking, I am not suggesting that you can somehow remove the need for core functionality. The bank still needs an engine that looks after accounts, agreements and postings with ruthless accuracy.
What I’m saying is that this engine must become smaller, sharper and better connected, so that the rest of the organisation can move at the speed customers now expect.
The illusion of digital is comforting. It creates a story you can tell the board.
“We have an app. We have open banking APIs. We have a chatbot.”
But if all of that still feeds into systems that behave like a 1970s mainframe, there is a limit to how far you can go.
Eventually the cracks show.
A migration fails.
A product launch gets delayed by eighteen months.
A competitor quietly eats your lunch (in your disaster kitchen).
The good news is that recognising façade digital for what it is can be liberating. It forces you to stop pretending that one more layer of UI will solve problems that are architectural in nature. It opens the door to a different conversation.
Not “how do we add another channel?”
but “what would it take to make the core behave like part of a platform?”
In my book I talk about this in depth and introduce a method that starts with Business Capabilities rather than systems.
For now, I would leave you with one reflection.
Next time someone presents a digital roadmap, ask how much of it changes the plumbing rather than just the taps.
If the answer is “not much,” then you are still mopping the floor.
If that stings a little, good. It means you already know where the real work needs to happen. And if you want a companion for that journey, that is exactly what the rest of the book is written to be.
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?
