FF News Tattoo Studio: Inside Oracle’s Financial Services Playbook

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Sibos 2025, Conor Colleary stepped to unpack Oracle financial services transformation—and what it takes for a tech giant with 150,000+ people in 160+ countries to move fast. After a light joke about putting the “big O” on his wrist, Colleary notes nearly a decade at Oracle, from Dubai back to Ireland – a career rooted in financial services.

Colleary says Oracle’s edge in financial services is its full stack: cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and the banking applications that runs the banking business. That breadth lets banks connect innovation to regulated, mission-critical operations without stitching together many vendors.

On agility at scale, Colleary points to leadership: fast, decisive choices that empower teams to act quickly. AI is the headline, but in financial services the job is turning it into safe, concrete gains, better customer service, quicker product rollout, and operational efficiency, rather than novelty. For environments where reliability is everything, Oracle says don’t “rip and replace.”and describes “hollowing out” the core: progressively moving components (e.g., billing, product catalogs) onto modern platforms to reduce risk and keep the bank running.

Two forces speed this up: SaaS for faster innovation and evergreen updates; and AI’s need for clean, accessible, well-governed data; something legacy cores often lack. Culture matters as much as tech: change management counters natural resistance. A bank may do one end-to-end digital transformation, however Oracle runs three or four a year and are able to spot pitfalls early.

For Colleary, Oracle financial services transformation is about real-world progress: better customer experiences, more efficient operations, and faster product launches—without jeopardizing mission-critical systems.