Things are progressing nicely towards the official publication date of my book Rip Out the Core.
The book will be published on 28 July, and the pre-order will be live on Amazon soon.
As I start increasing the communication and promotion around the book, I keep getting asked the same very fair question:
“So, what is the book actually about?”
The short answer is that it is about banking transformation, legacy systems, platform thinking, and why so many modernisation programmes go wrong.
The slightly more honest answer is that it is about all of that, explained through a flooded kitchen, a broken dishwasher, and far too many years spent watching banks try to modernise while pretending the old plumbing is still fine.
So I thought I would start sharing a few short extracts from the book.
This first one is from Chapter 1, A Flooded Kitchen and a Broken Bank, and it sets the scene for the whole book.
Because in banking, as in kitchens, the real problem usually started long before anyone noticed the water on the floor.
Chapter 1: A Flooded Kitchen and a Broken Bank
It started, like most domestic disasters do, on an otherwise ordinary weekday, a Thursday afternoon, to be precise. Although, this afternoon was not like all others.
I was deep into a full-day negotiation workshop with a major banking customer. The stakes were high. We were down to the shortlist, working to close a massive core banking transformation deal. We’d just wrapped up the morning session and were heading back in after lunch for the second half, the bit where you really earn your stripes and show the customer that you are the best partner for the job.
That’s when my phone rang.
It was my daughter, just home from school.
Now, when your kids call, even during a high-stakes customer meeting, you answer. Well, I do anyway.
She was calm, but hesitant. Too calm.
“Hi, Dad. The kitchen floor is… kind of covered in water.”
I froze.
See, I’d been an idiot that morning. In a rush to get out the door, I’d loaded the dishwasher and set it on a delayed start. Thought I was being clever. But I’d mistimed it; the machine kicked off hours before anyone was home to notice anything.
Back at the customer site, I nodded politely, said a quick “Thanks for letting me know,” and walked back into the meeting room like everything was fine.
But inside?
Absolute panic.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The kitchen. The water. The fact that our house is relatively old, built back when building codes were more like suggestions than actual rules. And the flooring? Of course it’s wood. Beautiful, absorbent, and ruinable wood. And to make things more exciting, the wood is sitting on concrete, which is not waterproofed.
And the worst part? I had no idea where the water was coming from. Was it still leaking? Had it stopped? My daughter reassured me that it didn’t look like more was coming. Which helped. A little.
But as I stood there in that fancy meeting room, guiding the conversation around modular architecture, business capability mapping, and vendor lock-in, all I could picture was water soaking silently into our kitchen floorboards, spreading, warping, and seeping under appliances, maybe even into the walls.
And that’s when it hit me.
This wasn’t just my kitchen.
This was banking.
When the Foundations Fail
If you work in a bank, especially in Information Technology (IT), ops, or transformation, you know this story. You’ve lived it. Maybe your “leak” was a batch failure, a system outage, or a critical process running on a 2003-era spreadsheet hidden in someone’s desktop folder called “final_final_v3_REALLY_final.xls”
The truth is, many banks are running on the equivalent of 40-year-old plumbing. I would even go as far as to say that most incumbent banks are the perfect IT museum with every version of every software ever written still in operation. They’ve patched, bolted, extended, and decorated their systems, but the underlying core? It’s old. It’s fragile. And just like my kitchen, eventually, it fails in the worst possible way, at the worst possible time.
And when that failure happens, the response is usually one of panic.
Rip it all out!
Big-bang core replacement!
Bring in the overpriced consultants!
Add more duct tape!
Here’s what I learned, the hard way during my career, and strengthened as I was sitting in that meeting room, pretending to be focused while my mind was stuck on water damage. It doesn’t have to be this way.
However, the urgency today is greater than just legacy fragility. The banking industry itself is undergoing profound and irreversible changes that make modernisation not just desirable, but existential.
The Foundations Are Crumbling and Shifting
Big Tech has stepped into the banking domain, and the growth of fintech, neo-banks, and embedded finance has introduced unprecedented competition. New entrants like Monzo, N26, and Revolut operate without the burden of legacy, offering seamless, customer-centric experiences that traditional banks struggle to match.
Meanwhile, customer expectations have shifted dramatically. Banking is no longer something people go to a bank for. It’s something invisible and embedded into their digital lives, paying through an app, borrowing within an e-commerce checkout, or getting financial advice via a chatbot powered by the latest version of ChatGPT or fancy Agentic Agents.
This fragmentation of customer journeys, combined with a demand for instant, frictionless, personalised services, is stretching legacy cores and manual processes to their breaking points. Traditional banks are finding that patching and bolting on solutions is no longer enough, and the very foundation is cracking under the pressure.
At the same time, the rise of platform business models means that banks can no longer expect to own the full customer relationship. Participation in ecosystems such as embedded finance, Banking-as-a-Service, and open finance, requires new business models, modular capabilities, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and real-time event processing. None of which legacy monoliths were designed to support.
I have long held, and continue to advocate, a strong belief that “future of banking will be dominated by platforms”.
Banks that embrace open, modular, and collaborative platform strategies will thrive. Those that cling to closed, monolithic models will gradually become obsolete. This platform reality is no longer a hypothesis, it is already reshaping financial services, and it will define the next era of banking.
Building the Foundations of Future Digital Transformation in Banking
The pandemic made one thing painfully clear, that most banks had built digital façades, not digital foundations.
Apps, chatbots, and online onboarding were deployed in haste, often exposing rather than fixing operational weaknesses. Front-end improvements, while necessary, are not enough. The real prize lies in end-to-end digitisation, intelligent orchestration, and customer-centric operations built from the inside out.
Winning banks will not simply digitalise customer touchpoints. They will rewire their entire operating models around digital platforms such as customer experience, middle office, and back office, with seamless integration across all layers. They will exploit exponential technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, hybrid cloud, and quantum computing. And they will apply these technologies at scale, connecting business units internally and partners externally through ecosystems.
Some banks are already moving rapidly in this direction. Others are still struggling to engage customers beyond the most basic, outdated ways. The gap between leaders and laggards is widening fast, and the consequences are beginning to show, not only in market share, but in customer trust, daily relevance, and the ability to delight the customer.
I experienced this reality first-hand recently.
It was one of those perfect days. The sun was high, the sky a boundless blue, and a soft warmth lingered in the air, almost surreal for February in Altea, Spain. We had found a small café along the beach, the kind of place that seemed built for lingering over endless tapas and sangria. It was a family vacation, a long, lazy lunch filled with laughter and love. One of those rare moments when time itself seems to stretch and slow down.
When it came time to settle the bill, my partner smiled and said, “I’ll take this one.” A sweet, simple gesture which was quickly followed by a much less sweet revelation and a moment of quiet panic. “I don’t have my wallet anymore.” Gone, along with her only bank card, her driver’s license, and everything else she needed to navigate a world increasingly hostile to cash. We knew she had it when we left a shop before lunch. Somewhere between the sunlight and the side streets, it had vanished. Maybe stolen. Maybe fallen. We would never know. What mattered now was that she had no way to pay, no identification (luckily, her passport was still back in the apartment), and no obvious safety net.
In theory, this should not have been a crisis. We live in an age where most people have multiple bank relationships, a wallet full of debit and credit cards, and digital options on standby. But not my adorable partner. She had one card, one bank, and one relationship with a major incumbent Nordic bank. No backup. No redundancy. No plan B.
Now, there is probably a broader discussion to be had about whether everyone should carry spare cards or maintain alternative payment options, but that is not the point. The point is what happened next, and what it revealed about the deep structural problems facing many incumbent banks today.
She did what any rational person would do. She opened the banking app, cancelled the lost card, and ordered a replacement. The app was functional, even smooth. A few taps and a confirmation message later, the immediate task was done.
And then… nothing.
A bland notification thanked her for her order and informed her that a new card would arrive in five business days. No message acknowledging that she was abroad. No offer of a temporary digital card. No question about whether she needed emergency support or access to cash. No human touch. No empathy.
The bank had all the information it needed to act differently. Multiple transactions in Spain. A flagged cancellation. Location data that clearly suggested a customer away from home. Yet there was no intelligent response, no anticipation of need, no activation of even the most basic proactive support. The situation called for real-time care, but she received only procedural indifference.
Had she been traveling alone, she would have been stranded. Luckily, I was there. But sitting there in the warm sun, I found myself growing increasingly angry, not just for her, but for what this incident exposed about the decay at the heart of traditional banking.
The tools to solve this problem exist. The data exists. The customer expectations are clear.
What is missing is the will and the ability to act.
Right there at the table, we downloaded the app of a new-generation Neo bank now available in Finland. In a matter of minutes, she was fully onboarded, issued a fully functional digital debit card, and able to transfer money out of her incumbent bank into her new account. Problem solved, but not by the bank she had trusted for years. Instead, a Neo bank she had never interacted with before managed to restore her financial independence before our coffee had cooled. No bureaucracy. No “please call our support line during business hours.” No assumption that she should simply endure being powerless for days.
The contrast could not have been clearer. One bank saw a lost card process.
The other saw a human being and a future loyal customer they wanted to delight.
The result was a silent but permanent shift of loyalty. Today, my partner still uses the old bank for a few legacy services, a student loan. But her daily financial life is migrating steadily and relentlessly into the hands of the Neo bank that helped her when it mattered most.
And it is not just her.
Quietly, persistently, people everywhere are fragmenting their financial lives across providers who meet them where they are, not where traditional banks wish they would stay. The days of monogamous banking relationships are ending. Customers are increasingly polygamous with their money, managing different parts of their financial lives through a mosaic of providers, and loyalty is earned transaction by transaction, experience by experience.
In a world of real-time personalisation, instant issuance, and proactive service, what excuse is there for a bank to behave like a disinterested bystander? Why didn’t the app recognise the pattern of card usage abroad and trigger a prompt offering support? Why wasn’t an emergency digital card automatically issued? Why wasn’t there a simple, human question of “Can we help you get access to funds today?”
The answer is painfully simple, old thinking, embedded in old systems.
But there is a better path, and some banks are already taking it.
Agentic banking, powered by personal AI agents, will fundamentally reshape how customers interact with financial services. Future consumers will not “open the banking app” or “log into online banking.” Instead, they will talk to their personal AI assistant, embedded in their device or environment, managing banking tasks seamlessly as part of daily life. These agents will understand customer needs contextually, initiate payments, manage savings and investments, and provide financial advice autonomously, without the customer even thinking about logging into a bank’s branded application.
The emergence of agentic banking will be facilitated by Generative AI (GenAI). GenAI is the engine that allows these intelligent personal agents to function, learn, and adapt to each customer’s unique context and preferences. It empowers banks to offer hyper-personalised, predictive services that anticipate and solve problems before the customer even notices them. Instead of reactive service models, banks must move toward proactive, self-correcting experiences. GenAI will also automate many of the bank’s internal operations, driving down costs and opening new frontiers in product innovation, compliance, and risk management.
Paolo Sironi captures this shift powerfully in Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies, noting that the industry must move “from an economy of output (products) to an economy of outcomes.” Banks will need to stop focusing on selling discrete products and start helping customers achieve financial well-being through orchestrated, outcome-based services.
Meanwhile, quantum computing presents another looming disruption. While the technology remains in its early stages, its implications for banking are profound. Quantum computers will eventually break many of today’s standard encryption methods, forcing banks to rethink security at a foundational level. But beyond the threats, quantum also offers exponential processing power that could revolutionise portfolio optimisation, fraud detection, risk analysis, and financial modelling. Banks that begin preparing for the post-quantum world today will be far better positioned when this new paradigm arrives.
The book Rip Out the Core will be published at the end of July 2026, but it is already available for preorder on Amazon.
