FF News Tattoo Studio: Why Dharmesh Mistry Believes OpenCoreOS Represents the Next Generation of Core Banking

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Fintech Talents Festival 2025, we caught up with Dharmesh Mistry as he had an OpenCoreOS logo tattooed, a fitting backdrop for a chat about building businesses, solving problems, and why core banking needs to catch up.

Mistry says he started out in banking, and learned early how difficult it was to turn ideas into reality inside big institutions, especially in the 1980s. He’s always had ideas he wanted to put into practice, and found banks weren’t always built for that kind of speed, even when the work itself was interesting. A lot of what motivates Mistry comes back to coding as he began programming around age 11 or 12, long before it was seen as cool or lucrative, and describes it as pure problem solving. He remembers clocking in and out at Lloyds Bank, but then arriving early and staying late anyway, simply because he enjoyed getting to the solution and then improving it again and again.

Looking back, Mistry points to a few standout moments: helping shape the idea and prototype for a “single customer view” at Lloyds in the 1980s, and launching one of the UK’s first internet banks which the first to run on Java. What Mistry most proud of there is proving on day one that the service could run not just online, but on a mobile device and even a set-top TV box, showing the “run anywhere” promise in a real banking setting.

Today, Mistry is focused on OpenCoreOS, where he’s joined the Board as Chair and Mistry describes the challenge clearly: legacy core banking systems are slow, hard to change, don’t scale well, and don’t work smoothly across multiple clouds. OpenCoreOS, he says, is built to solve that as its designed from day one to be distributed as multi-cloud, so if a provider like AWS or Azure has an outage, the system keeps running.

Mistry also frames OpenCoreOS as AI-native, not AI bolted on later and talks about using conversation-style prompts to create new financial products; for example, asking the core to produce a deposit account with certain fees, rates, and rewards and having it generate what’s needed faster than traditional build cycles.

Mistry finishes with a simple view of the market: what many still call “modern cores” reflect what modern looked like ten years ago, and the next step is being built now, with AI and resilience as the baseline, not an upgrade.

With Dharmesh Mistry OpenCoreOS Core Banking at the forefront, the next generation of banking platforms won’t just be modern—they’ll be self-adaptive, composable, and resilient by default.