“An urgent call for incumbents to stop hiding behind legacy cores and asset size and go all in on digital and agentic banking, using no-core principles and Pål’s kitchen disaster as a brutally honest lens on what it will take to survive the next era.” – Brett King, Futurist & Author of Branch Tomorrow, and Bank 2.0-5.0 Series
There is something special, scary and exciting about writing a book.
You take your thoughts, your experience, your hard-earned lessons and the occasional painful mistake, and you put them down in words for the world to read. And once they are printed, they stop being just ideas in your head. They become something other people can criticise, analyse, review, challenge, agree with, disagree with, or quietly use against you over coffee.
That is both wonderful and slightly terrifying.
I spent many years getting ready to write the first words of Rip Out the Core, and then a little over twelve months getting from the first paragraph to the last. Along the way, I had a lot of support, encouragement and nudging from people I respect enormously. I will never forget that.
But eventually you reach the point where encouragement is no longer enough.
At some point, someone serious needs to read the thing.
Brett King has been a good friend for some time now, but he is also one of the most recognised voices in banking and fintech. He is a prolific author, has written extensively about the future of banking, founded a bank, built one of the most influential podcasts in the industry, and when he speaks, people tend to listen.
So when the manuscript was close to complete, I could think of no one better to review it.
To be fair, Brett had already been there during the journey. Not as someone reviewing every chapter or shaping every argument, but as a source of moral support, encouragement and the occasional well-timed push. Then, when the book was about 95% finished, I asked him to read it properly.
And, if he felt it deserved one, perhaps write a foreword I could include in the book.
No pressure, obviously…
So, what does did he say?
Using Pål’s kitchen disaster analogy, I thought I’d get into the idioms. In Australia where I grew up, there’s a saying that you are “throwing everything but the kitchen sink” at a problem – it signifies using every possible resource, idea or effort to achieve a particular outcome. In the instance of banking, this could never be more true than today.
Banking is undergoing a once in a century shift, a fundamental reshaping of where banking lies in our communities and economies, redefined by technology capabilities and experiences.
In Rip Out the Core, Pål explores the efforts to patch existing silo’d technologies and organizational structures as largely futile with the massive emerging requirements we see for successful transformation today. In the industry there are plenty of approaches to this problem from core replacement strategies, to side-car cores, and even core-less middleware layers that are popularized.
In the meanwhile, all of the fastest growing banks in the world are new entrants, digital native players with highly scalable, super cost-efficient customer acquisition capabilities. The largest bank in China by customers is WeBank today, the largest wallet ecosystem in the world Alipay, the largest bank in Latin America NuBank, who is also the largest company in Brazil by market capitalization. Revolut topped out at 65 million customers this year, making it the largest bank in the EU by customer numbers, and with a valuation of $75 Billion after their last round, one of the highest valued neobanks globally. N26 is either the second or third largest bank in the German market depending on how you measure the numbers
Just a decade ago as these neo-banks were getting started most incumbents were claiming this was all ‘much ado about nothing’. The excuses were…
1. They are only growing that fast because they are so small 2. They will never be able to manage risk as well as the incumbents 3. They aren’t likely to be profitable any time soon
For all of these objections to the neo-banks of the 2010s we now see that these arguments were simply false. The Neos beat incumbents on customer growth, on revenue growth and on total number of customers globally today by a significant margin. The top-20 retail fintechs command over 4 billion customers, while the top-20 retail banks top out at 2.7 billion customers. There’s an argument to be made that digital banks have already won the day-to-day banking battle for dominance globally. What’s left to argue today?
“Yes, but they don’t have the asset size…”
That’s true, although I wonder how your asset size as an incumbent is likely to help you become a truly transformed, digital native and AI-capable bank for the next decade? It’s likely not something that will help you in these objectives as a bank.
This is why Pål’s book is so timely today. To compete in the banking era that comes next, you can’t be torn between your objective to support the traditional business and the emerging business. You need to go all in on digital or you will be giving away market share, mind share and soon asset share to more agile digital competitors. You need to throw everything but the kitchen sink at this effort, or you are risking obsolescence.
The next era of banking is Agentic, AI-based banking. Your core is your greatest limitation if you are an incumbent. You can’t run agentic processes on a legacy core. You can’t run smart contracts on a legacy core. You can’t even run tokenized operations using fiat currency, the basic unit on your core.
If you want to adapt to what comes next, you need to think as if you are building a new bank from the ground up. You need to rip out the foundations of the old, and imagine something completely new. Anything short of this won’t be enough to get you there.
Thank you Pål for bringing us to this moment and giving us a clear vision of where we need to go
The book Rip Out the Core will be published at the end of July 2026, but it is already available for preorder on Amazon.
