“Should banks rip out their core systems? A new book gives you a good view” –Chris Skinner, author and commentator, The Finanser Ltd
There are few people in banking and fintech who have shaped the conversation as consistently, provocatively and generously as Chris Skinner. He has spent decades challenging the industry to look beyond its own comfortable assumptions, while somehow managing to remain both one of its sharpest critics and one of its most recognisable champions. Chris has written more books than most of us have managed to start, has built a genuinely global voice in the industry, and has never been short of a strong view when one is needed.
He has also joined Ville and me several times on Fintech Daydreaming, always bringing insight, energy and the sort of candid conversation that makes a podcast episode worth listening to. More importantly, beneath the public profile, the opinions and the occasional well-aimed grenade into the industry debate, Chris is simply a thoroughly good chap. As a fellow Englishman (ish), I feel entitled to say that he is proper good value, one of the good ones, and very much someone you would be happy to have a pint with while putting the world of banking to rights.
That is why his review of Rip Out the Core means so much to me.
So, what does Chris have to say?
Every few years someone publishes another book explaining how banks should modernise their core systems. Most disappear without leaving much of a trace. They tend to be written by consultants, full of diagrams, acronyms and methodologies that promise certainty in a world where certainty doesn’t exist. They tell you what the destination looks like but rarely explain how to survive the journey.
Pål Krogdahl’s Rip Out the Core is different.
Not because it has discovered some revolutionary new way to modernise banks. There isn’t one. If there were, the banking industry would have done this years ago. It is different because it is written by someone who has spent decades in the trenches rather than the conference circuit. Every chapter feels like it has been earned through failed programmes, difficult meetings, political compromises and the slow, often frustrating reality of changing institutions that were never designed to change.
The title is provocative. The message isn’t.
In fact, one of the biggest strengths of the book is that it dismantles the mythology surrounding core replacement. The answer isn’t to rip everything out. The answer is to understand what the core actually is, what should remain, what should disappear and how to modernise whilst the bank continues to function. After all, customers still expect their salaries to arrive tomorrow morning, regulators still expect accurate reporting, and treasury still expects the numbers to balance. You don’t get the luxury of closing for refurbishment.
That sounds obvious, yet banking has spent the past thirty years repeatedly convincing itself otherwise.
I’ve watched billion-dollar transformation programmes begin with enormous optimism before collapsing under the weight of unrealistic ambition. Everyone wants the perfect target architecture. Nobody wants to spend years migrating to it. Somewhere between those two realities sits the graveyard of failed core replacement projects.
Krogdahl understands that graveyard because he’s walked through it.
Throughout the book, Krogdahl likens bank core systems upgrades to a kitchen. You keep fixing the leaks, rather than dealing with the plumbing. The kitchen renovation analogy works well although reading about dishwashers and plumbing hardly sounds like the basis for a serious discussion about banking architecture. Yet it becomes an effective reminder that technology transformation is rarely about technology. It is about sequencing, planning, patience and understanding that you cannot demolish the room whilst people are still living in the house.
That lesson alone is worth the price of the book.
Where Rip Out the Core really distinguishes itself is in refusing to treat technology as the answer. Capability models, platform architectures, APIs, ecosystems, AI and cloud all appear, but they are presented as tools rather than objectives. Too many transformation programmes still begin with a technology decision and only afterwards ask what business problem they are trying to solve. Krogdahl reverses that logic. Start with capability and outcomes, then work backwards into architecture. It sounds simple because it is. It is also astonishing how rarely banks do it.
The book then moves into open banking, embedded finance, AI agents and ecosystem orchestration, all of which are steadily redefining what banks actually do. The interesting question is no longer whether banking changes but whether traditional providers can change quickly enough to keep up.
This is where the book feels timely.
Legacy has become fashionable to discuss but remains deeply misunderstood. People often think legacy means COBOL or mainframes. It doesn’t. Legacy is accumulated decision-making. It is decades of compromises, acquisitions, regulatory responses, tactical fixes and organisational politics embedded inside software. Replacing code is relatively easy but replacing thirty years of institutional behaviour is much harder.
The book understands this distinction extremely well.
That doesn’t mean it is beyond criticism.
At times the book tries to cover almost every aspect of banking transformation. There are moments where a firmer editorial hand could have reduced repetition and sharpened the pace. Some chapters explain concepts that most experienced transformation leaders will already know, whilst others assume a level of architectural knowledge that many board members don’t have. Sitting somewhere inbetween executive strategy and technical handbook occasionally leaves the audience slightly blurred.
I also found myself wanting more war stories.
The fictional NOIT Bank provides continuity, but some of the strongest parts of the book are where Krogdahl’s own experience quietly surfaces beneath the text. Those moments feel authentic because they are authentic. More of those stories and fewer frameworks would have made a good book stronger.
Nevertheless, none of that changes my overall view.
What makes Rip Out the Core stand out is its honesty. It never pretends transformation is easy. It never promises quick wins or silver bullets. It repeatedly reminds the reader that banking transformation is difficult because banking itself is difficult. That realism is refreshing in an industry increasingly dominated by simplistic AI narratives and marketing slogans about digital disruption.
There is another reason I like this book as it arrives at exactly the right moment.
Artificial intelligence is forcing banks to rethink architecture from first principles. Agentic systems, real-time decisioning, composable platforms and intelligent automation all assume clean, modular, event-driven foundations. None of those ambitions sit comfortably on fragmented architectures built for overnight batch processing. Whether banks like it or not, the conversation about core modernisation has become the conversation about competitive survival.
That makes this book considerably more relevant than it might have been five years ago.
If you are a CTO, chief architect, transformation executive or anyone responsible for deciding how a bank evolves over the next decade, you should read Rip Out the Core.
Pål Krogdahl has written one of the better books on banking transformation that I’ve read in recent years because it avoids the trap that so many technology books fall into. It isn’t trying to impress you with cleverness. It is trying to help you avoid making expensive mistakes and, in banking, that may be the most valuable outcome of all.
Join us for the Helsinki launch of Rip Out the Core: A DIY Guide to Platform-Enabled Banking Transformation, the new book by Pål Krogdahl.
The book tackles a problem every bank knows too well: you can’t keep patching legacy systems forever, but you also can’t just rip everything out and start over. Customers still need their payments. Regulators still need their reports. Staff still need systems that work. The art is in modernising step by step, capability by capability, without bringing the whole structure down. Pål calls this Platform-Enabled Banking Transformation.
The evening is a relaxed industry gathering around the themes of the book. Expect a fireside chat, networking, a book signing, and a few honest conversations about what it really takes to fix banking from the inside out.
Every attendee will receive a copy of the book, thanks to Aura Cloud, a cloud-native core banking provider and sponsor of the book giveaway.
When: Thursday 13 August 2026, 16:30 to 19:00 Where: Maria 01, Helsinki Hosted by Digital Banking Academy & Fintech Farm. Spaces are limited, so sign up early…
