I took a picture with my new book Rip Out the Core and some other key books in my collection, because I wanted a good picture for something different I was working on. There was no grand intellectual plan behind it. I gathered some important books that have influenced my thinking, balanced them on top of each other along with my new book and tried to make the stack look good.
Then I looked at the photograph and realised that the books I had selected were already telling a story, but not in the correct sequence. So I changed the order made some small changes and took a new picture, this one.
And why? you ask.
But before I go any further, a small confession. The title of this article is a deliberate nod to my friend Paolo Sironi’s podcast, The Bankers’ Bookshelf, where he speaks with authors and researchers whose ideas are shaping banking and fintech. I borrowed it rather shamelessly, although Paolo should probably consider that partial repayment for all the thinking I have borrowed from him over the years.
My own book, Rip Out the Core, sits at the bottom. I would like to say this is because it provides the strong foundation supporting all the intellectual thinking above it. But the reason is simpler, and we will get into that later.
One important book is missing from the photograph. The Intelligent Ledger by Dharmesh Mistry and Louis R. Carlozo is due later this year, so I do not yet have a physical copy to add to the pile. It belongs in this reading journey because it looks further ahead, towards a banking industry shaped by the convergence of agentic AI, digital twins, quantum computing, data and tokenisation.
This is not intended to be a definitive list of the best books about banking and fintech. That would be a considerably longer article, and probably start several arguments before anyone reads to the end of this blogpost. There are many excellent books from authors and friends including Brett King, Chris Skinner and Theodora Lau, to mention only a few. And I recommend you read them all.
This is something more specific. It is a reading route for banking executives and transformation leaders who want to understand the journey from the industry they have inherited to the bank they may need to build next.
No book stands entirely on its own, or at least I do not think a good one does. There is no realistic way for one author to understand every dimension of banking transformation, let alone fit it all between two covers. Each of us comes at the subject through our own experience, scars, assumptions and occasional obsessions. My book is no different, even though a small part of me would obviously love it to be the one and only book you ever need.
The books in this stack work because they approach the problem from different directions. Together, they help answer a sequence of questions that every serious banking transformation eventually confronts. Why is change so difficult? What are banks carrying with them? Where is the industry going? What might the architecture of the future look like? And, once the vision has been agreed, how does a bank actually get there without breaking itself along the way?
The order matters, because each book changes the question you carry into the next one.
Start with the people: Bankers Like Us
I would begin with Bankers Like Us by Leda Glyptis because banking transformation has an irritating habit of starting in the wrong place.
The conversation usually begins with technology. The core is too old, the data is fragmented, the architecture is too tightly coupled and the operating model cannot move quickly enough. Someone produces a diagram containing several brightly coloured clouds, a new integration layer and, if the budget allows, a lighthouse pointing towards the target state.
Then everyone wonders why the programme becomes stuck.
Leda begins somewhere more honest. She begins with the people who must make the change happen, and with what she calls the “messy middle” of working inside an industry that genuinely wants to change but is remarkably skilled at getting in its own way. Bankers Like Us deals with culture, leadership, habits, diversity and the organisational behaviours that can quietly defeat even a sensible transformation. It does so with humour and humanity rather than pretending that institutional change can be reduced to another framework or steering committee.
That is an important starting point because banks are not transformed by architecture diagrams. They are transformed by people who have budgets to defend, careers to protect, regulators to satisfy and existing businesses to keep running. They often work inside organisations where yesterday’s compromise has become today’s policy, and where everyone agrees that something must change as long as the change happens somewhere else.
Leda’s book does not excuse those behaviours, but it helps explain them. It makes the people doing the work feel seen, which is more important than it may sound when you are in the fourth year of a three-year programme and attending another meeting to discuss why the decisions from the previous meeting have not yet been implemented.
This book is also personal for me. Leda was one of the people who encouraged me to turn the thinking behind Rip Out the Core into an actual manuscript. What began as a conversation became a real book through her support, guidance and introduction to the publisher, and she later wrote one of its forewords.
That connection also runs through the two books. Leda describes the human reality of attempting change inside banking. Rip Out the Core picks up that reality and asks what it means when the thing being changed is the technology and operational estate at the heart of the bank, something most executives would prefer not to touch, but increasingly cannot afford to leave alone. As Leda writes in her foreword, no sensible decision-maker chooses core transformation lightly, yet no sensible business leader wants to face the future with unresolved legacy risk sitting at the centre of the institution.
You can also check out the episode of the Fintech Daydreaming Podcast episode where Leda joined Ville and I to discuss the book – here
A worthwhile second volume: Beyond Resilience
I would follow Bankers Like Us with Leda’s second book, Beyond Resilience. The first book explains much of what makes transformation difficult. The second turns the question around and looks at the patterns behind people who have successfully built new banks, fintech businesses and financial services, whether from scratch or within an existing organisation.
What I like about this progression is that it avoids the usual heroic mythology. Successful transformation is rarely the story of a visionary leader arriving with a perfect plan while the organisation suddenly discovers courage and falls into line. The reality is more awkward. Decisions are made with incomplete information. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Timing matters. People make mistakes, adjust and occasionally succeed despite themselves.
Beyond Resilience examines whether there are repeatable patterns beneath those experiences, including control, consistency, integrity, cost awareness and the ability to remain adaptable without abandoning the original purpose.
Read together, Leda’s books provide both sides of the transformation experience. They explain why organisations resist change, but they also show that progress is possible when people are honest about the work, the economics and the compromises involved. That is a much better foundation for the rest of the reading journey than beginning with a technology product or a target architecture.
And, yes, she did join us back on Fintech Daydreaming to talk about this book as well – here
Understand what you inherited: Calista’s Paradox
Once you have considered the people, move to Calista’s Paradox by Erik Åkesson and Elaine Stirling.
In banking, we tend to use the word “legacy” with a slightly curled lip. Legacy is the old core platform, the overnight batch, the COBOL application or the spreadsheet created by someone called Susan in 2007 that now appears to be responsible for half the regulatory reporting process.
All of these things can be legacy, but they are only the parts we can see.
Legacy also exists in product structures, policies, customer promises, organisational boundaries, data definitions and decisions made by people who were solving the problems of their own time. Some of those decisions were poor. Many were entirely rational when they were made. The difficulty is that yesterday’s rational response can gradually become tomorrow’s constraint, long after everyone has forgotten what problem it was originally intended to solve.
Calista’s Paradox takes this much wider view. It combines a novella about a young woman inheriting a troubled family gemstone business with a broader examination of legacy across business, finance, healthcare, aviation, the military and psychology. The unusual format works because it gives legacy a human shape before turning it into a management discussion.
The systems we criticise today have processed billions of transactions, survived acquisitions, supported regulatory change and kept banks operating through several crises. They became legacy partly because they worked for long enough to outlive the assumptions on which they were built.
Legacy is evidence of survival, but it is also accumulated constraint. Those two ideas can coexist, and any transformation that fails to understand both is likely to make poor decisions.
Erik often makes the point that you need to understand how you arrived where you are before deciding where to go next. I agree with him, but I would add a warning. Understanding the past must not become an excuse to rebuild it.
Banks regularly begin modernisation by documenting the current state in extraordinary detail. Every process, interface, exception, variation and local workaround is captured. Months pass, walls disappear beneath diagrams and the organisation becomes so invested in describing the existing bank that the only imaginable future is a cleaner, cloudier version of what it already has.
The purpose of understanding legacy is not to preserve every element of it. It is to distinguish between what still has value, what must remain temporarily anchored to the past and what has reached the point where it should be allowed to end. Otherwise, the current state quietly becomes the target state, and legacy wins by default.
This is the bridge into Rip Out the Core. My argument is never that banks should ignore the past or demolish everything indiscriminately. The kitchen metaphor running through the book is built around the opposite lesson. You must understand where the water is coming from before tearing up the floor, but once you have found the leak, there is little value in spending another year documenting how wet everything is.
And you have probably also started to see a trend between these books and the Fintech Daydreaming podcast. So I will not let you down, here is the link
Look up and see where banking is going: Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies
Once you understand the people attempting the change and the legacy they are carrying, the next question is where the bank is actually trying to go. That is where Paolo Sironi’s Banks and Fintech on Platform Economiesbelongs.
I have said for years that the future of banking will be dominated by platforms. This does not mean that every bank needs to launch a marketplace, fill it with partner logos and assume network effects will arrive shortly afterwards. It means banking is moving into an economy where the customer journey, the financial product, the distribution relationship and the institution providing the balance sheet may all sit in different places.
Customers do not wake up wanting to do some banking. They want to buy a home, run a business, travel, protect something or get through the month without another financial surprise. Banking appears inside those moments, increasingly through platforms and services that may not belong to a bank at all.
Paolo’s book explains the shift from selling financial outputs towards helping customers achieve outcomes. It examines contextual and conscious banking, Banking-as-a-Service and Banking-as-a-Platform, and considers how platform economics changes the relationship between banks, fintech companies, Big Tech and the customers they all want to serve.
Paolo and I worked closely together during last years at IBM, and we had many conversations around embedded finance, platforms and the changing structure of banking. I would like to claim that I contributed a meaningful share of the intellectual foundations of his book. In truth, I probably took more insight from Paolo than he took from me, although our discussions certainly helped sharpen my own thinking about the platformification of the industry.
The important conclusion is that a bank can no longer define itself entirely through the products it manufactures. It must decide which capabilities genuinely differentiate it, which can be consumed from a wider ecosystem, which can be provided to others and where the bank has a credible right to orchestrate the relationship.
This is where the legacy discussion becomes commercially urgent. Traditional banking architecture was designed for an institution that manufactured products, controlled distribution and owned most of the customer relationship. A platform economy assumes modular capabilities, external partners, real-time interaction and journeys that may begin and end outside the bank.
The problem with the old architecture is therefore not simply that it is old. It was built for a different shape of bank.
Imagine the bank after next: The Intelligent Ledger
Having understood where platform economics is taking banking, the next book should stretch the horizon further. This is where The Intelligent Ledger by Dharmesh Mistry and Louis R. Carlozo enters the stack.
I should be clear that the finished book has not yet been published, so I have not read the final version. I do, however, know Dharmesh and his thinking well. He wrote one of the forewords to Rip Out the Core, and we have spent plenty of time discussing what comes after today’s core banking architectures.
Dharmesh has long argued that banking needs to move beyond disconnected systems and isolated decisions towards something closer to a single brain, capable of understanding context, coordinating actions and acting intelligently across the bank. The Intelligent Ledger develops that thinking through what the authors describe as the convergence of digital twins, agentic AI, quantum simulation, integrated data and tokenisation. It also frames the strategic choice as one between becoming a platform or accepting the role of a pipe inside somebody else’s ecosystem.
I expect to disagree with parts of the book, and Dharmesh will probably be disappointed if I do not. I remain sceptical about some of the larger claims being made around tokenisation, for example. Moving a token quickly does not automatically solve an end-to-end payment, liquidity or market problem, and new technologies have an unfortunate habit of removing friction in one place while recreating it somewhere less visible.
But that is precisely why the book belongs in this reading journey. A worthwhile book about the future should not be treated as scripture. It should force the reader to examine assumptions and decide where the argument is strong, where it is premature and what it means for decisions being made today.
What happens when customers delegate more financial activity to AI agents? What happens when the primary interface to banking no longer belongs to the bank? How should an institution prepare for quantum computing when the timing remains uncertain but the security implications cannot be ignored? What becomes of the ledger when data, intelligence and execution move closer together?
The answer is unlikely to be one universal architecture, and the technologies will not mature at the same speed in every market. The deeper point is that banks need to stop designing target states as fixed pictures of a perfect future. By the time a large bank reaches that picture, the future will have moved.
The objective should be to build an institution capable of changing direction without rebuilding itself every time something important changes.
And here I must disappoint you. The book is not yet out, but we have a slot in the near future to bring Dharmesh into the virtual studio for a good discussion about the Intelligent Ledger.
Then work out how to get there: Rip Out the Core
By this point in the reading journey, we have covered a great deal of ground. Leda has shown us the human and organisational reality of transformation. Erik and Elaine have helped us understand the legacy the bank has inherited, and the danger of allowing that legacy to define what comes next. Paolo has explained how platforms and ecosystems are changing where banking happens and how value is created. Dharmesh and Louis have looked further ahead towards a bank shaped by intelligent agents, programmable infrastructure and new forms of computing.
There is only one small problem. The bank still has to get there.
The institution in front of you has customers, employees, products, regulators and systems that cannot simply be switched off while everyone builds the future next door. Payments must still clear, accounts must still balance, fraud must still be managed and regulatory reports must still arrive. Somewhere inside the organisation, Susan’s spreadsheet is also still doing something nobody quite understands but everyone is afraid to stop.
My book does contain a view of the future, including thin cores, modular capabilities, coreless and multi-core architectures, and the role of platforms and ecosystems. But it was never intended to prescribe the same destination for every bank. Different institutions have different customers, markets, regulatory obligations and starting points. They must make deliberate decisions about what to build, what to buy and what to consume from the ecosystem.
The book is really about the bridge between the bank that exists and the bank it needs to become. It looks at how to define a future without allowing the current state to constrain it, how to make progressive transformation business-led rather than reducing it to a technology replacement programme, and how to deliver change capability by capability while the existing institution continues to operate.
It moves through Blueprint, Construct and Harden because successful transformation requires more than choosing a target architecture. The first step is to understand the business the bank wants to become and the capabilities it will require. The next is to build and prove the first meaningful slice of that future. The third is to harden, scale and operate it without discovering that the organisation was perfectly designed to support a pilot but completely unable to absorb the change.
It is easy to draw the future and equally easy to criticise the past. The difficult work happens in between, where vision meets delivery, principles collide with trade-offs and the bank must continue banking while its foundations are being changed.
The red thread through the bookshelf
These books do not agree on everything, and they should not. A good bookshelf is not a choir singing the same song. It is closer to a dinner table occupied by intelligent people who bring different experiences, interrupt each other occasionally and force you to reconsider something you had previously assumed was settled.
And a dinner with these people is a dream I plan to realise as soon as possible, the discussions will be fantastic!
There is, however, a clear thread running through this particular stack. Transformation begins with people, and those people work inside institutions shaped by years of accumulated legacy. That legacy is becoming increasingly incompatible with a platform economy in which distribution, context and customer ownership are moving beyond the traditional boundaries of the bank. Emerging technologies will place further pressure on those boundaries, whether every prediction about their timing proves correct or not. Banks therefore need a practical way to move forward without pretending that either the past or the future is simpler than it really is.
Read Bankers Like Us to understand the people doing the work, and follow it with Beyond Resilience to explore what successful builders have learned. Read Calista’s Paradox to understand what the organisation is carrying and why legacy should be examined rather than simply condemned. Read Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies to understand the wider structural change taking place across financial services. Read The Intelligent Ledger to challenge your assumptions about the bank that may come next.
Then, obviously, read Rip Out the Core to work out how to start moving without bringing the entire house down around you.
No book stands alone. Mine certainly does not, although looking again at the photograph, it does appear to be holding the others up rather well.
I will take that.
Join us for the Helsinki launch of Rip Out the Core: A DIY Guide to Platform-Enabled Banking Transformation:
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 via this link.
