What does it take to build a core banking platform fit for the next era of financial services?
We started with seven uncompromising principles needed for the core of ‘2040’.
Core banking systems have long been a source of frustration for financial institutions. Tightly coupled architectures, vendor dependency, painful upgrades, and a chronic inability to respond quickly to regulatory change, these are problems the industry has lived with for decades.
When we set out to build a 4th-generation core banking platform, we didn't want to iterate on those constraints. We wanted to eliminate them. To do that, we established seven foundational design principles: a set of goals we believed were non-negotiable for any modern core. We call them the Magnificent Seven.
The framework
The Magnificent Seven
Here's what they are, and why each one matters:
Self-sufficiency
1. The power to build products yourself
For decades, banks were beholden to their core vendors. Customisation was difficult, expensive, and frequently impossible without specialist resources. Regulatory changes demanded responses in timeframes that legacy systems simply couldn't meet.
Our first and most fundamental principle was giving financial institutions the ability to build products themselves, through configuration where possible, and code where needed. Both capabilities sit directly in the hands of the customer.
This unlocks three critical things: launching new front-book products quickly, migrating legacy books onto a modern platform, and responding to regulatory change in good time, without waiting in a vendor queue to do it.
Composability
2. Best-practice, reusable building blocks
Self-sufficiency doesn't mean starting from scratch every time. Our second principle was ensuring the platform ships with a rich, battle-tested library of reusable modules, pre-built components covering distinct product functionality that banks can compose dynamically into any product type.
Rather than siloed product modules (a "loan module" or a "current account module"), we took a horizontal approach. An interest calculator, for example, isn't tied to a deposit or a loan, it simply calculates interest. How it's configured and where it's applied is entirely up to the bank assembling the product.
This composable model eliminates repetition, accelerates time-to-market, and ensures that every building block is shared, tested, and constantly improving across the entire customer base.
Developer experience
3. Language of choice
Specialised core banking systems have historically required specialised developers, a bottleneck that constrains talent acquisition, inflates costs, and concentrates knowledge in ways that create risk.
Our third principle was simple: let banks use the languages and skill sets they already have. Whether a team is Java-heavy, .NET-native, or Python-first, they can build against and extend our platform without retooling. You keep your existing talent and your existing culture - and you still get access to a Tier 1-grade core.
4. Market-leading security and resiliency
We built our platform alongside
Tier 1 institutions from the very beginning, which meant designing for the most demanding standards from day one, not retrofitting enterprise-grade security after the fact.
Critically, every customer (regardless of size) runs on the same hardened platform. The security, resilience, and observability that works for a global Tier 1 bank works identically for a mutual, a credit union, or a digital challenger. There is one codebase, one standard, and no tiered product.
5. Forward-compatible, non-breaking upgrades
Ask any bank about upgrading their core and you'll hear the same story: it's painful, expensive, and risky, especially once customisation has occurred. Many institutions are running on versions years out of date precisely because upgrading feels too dangerous to attempt.
We designed upgrades to be a non-event. Continuous, non-breaking feature releases and security fixes are deployed on an ongoing basis. Every customer runs on our latest version. Existing integrations and customisations remain intact.
We've passed 100 feature releases with every customer on the current version, and they've never had to choose between staying current and staying stable.
6. Event-driven, real-time data access
Data access has always mattered in financial services. In the era of AI, it matters even more, and latency is no longer acceptable.
Our platform is event-sourced by design: every action, every transaction, every state change is immediately available as a real-time event stream. There are no overnight batch processes, no stale data dumps, no copying and restoring of databases. Your data environment, your AI models, your downstream systems, all fed in real time, from the core itself.
As banks begin to reconsider origination flows, digital channels, and how they apply AI to both structured and unstructured data, having a core that natively streams events isn't a nice-to-have. It's foundational.
7. Migration as a first-class citizen
Replacing a core banking system means confronting decades of legacy products: books with 20, 30, sometimes 50 years of history that still need to run on a new platform.
Rather than treating migration as a third-party problem or an afterthought, we built migration tooling directly into the core itself. Banks can move data and products onto the platform in a controlled, reliable way, giving them a credible path to decommissioning legacy infrastructure and genuinely shutting down old systems.
Principles that scale with you
What makes these seven principles powerful isn't any one of them in isolation, it's how they work together.
A bank can build its own products, using its own team, on a platform that stays current automatically, exposes every data point in real time, and can absorb its existing book through built-in migration tooling. At enterprise grade. Without vendor lock-in.
That's the architecture we believe modern financial services demands, not a marginal improvement on the systems of the last generation, but a genuine step change in what a core banking platform can and should do.
Every one of our customers is referenceable. We think that says something.
A practical guide on how to buy a 4th-gen core banking system
Our how to buy a 4th-gen core playbook is full of no-nonsense practical information to help your buying journey. Inside you'll find:
- Expert perspectives on the future of banking
- Advice on creating a business case that survives the journey
- How to navigate the trade‑offs behind closed-box and open-ended cores
- Buyer checkpoints
- Evaluation criteria
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