EXCLUSIVE: “Building the Next Era of Finance” – XYB in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

XYB explains why financial institutions can’t deliver on AI, compliance, or strategy without rethinking their architecture

For years, banks have been told to transform. Modernise tech stacks. Rethink customer experiences. Move faster. Integrate smarter. Embed everywhere.

But, despite ambitious roadmaps and significant investments, many financial institutions remain stuck. Not for lack of vision, capability, or funding, but because the very foundation they’re building on wasn’t designed for change. Engineers are drowning in integration backlogs. Product launches stalled. Leadership is caught between patching outdated systems or committing to multi-year transformation programmes that overpromise and underdeliver.

The real blocker? It’s not capability. It’s architecture.

Until that changes, transformation will keep falling short. Legacy systems, even those wrapped in Cloud were built for a different era – one that prioritised stability over agility and control over composability. Back then, products launched annually, customer expectations were predictable, and quarterly release cycles were enough to stay relevant.

But today’s market doesn’t move in predictable cycles. It moves in real time. Banks are expected to launch new products at speed, pivot to market shifts overnight, and connect seamlessly across fintechs, platforms, and partner ecosystems. Real-time finance demands real-time financial infrastructure, but that level of adaptability can’t run on rigid, siloed systems.

Today’s most profitable new financial providers didn’t win by offering radically different products. They won by offering them at the right time, and iterating fast enough to stay relevant. Because, in a market where customer needs shift quickly and margins are under pressure, time-to-market has become a proxy for competitiveness. The providers able to respond to demand in weeks, not months, are the ones that repeatedly earn loyalty.

For larger, incumbent institutions, the challenge isn’t lack of ambition. It’s the inertia baked into complex systems, where every new product requires orchestration across teams, platforms, and approval layers that were never designed to move together. This growing divergence in speed – between what strategy requires and what systems allow – is where the next wave of differentiation will play out.

The intelligence gap

Ask anyone in finance what will define their business over the next five years, and the answer is almost always AI. The ambition is real: predictive fraud detection, dynamic pricing, and hyper-personalised experiences. But the financial infrastructure to support it is still stuck in the past. Despite 91 per cent believing in its transformative impact, only 27 per cent of banking executives say their organisation has the infrastructure to fully leverage it, according to Accenture. The gap isn’t ambition – it’s financial architecture.

Clean, connected, real-time data is required for intelligence-driven finance. But most banks are still grappling with dirty data, siloed systems and brittle integrations. Proofs of concepts are everywhere, but real outcomes are rare. And until the architecture evolves to handle dynamic, event-driven processes and real-time responsiveness, AI will remain a proof of concept, not a key differentiator.

“Ask anyone in finance what will define their business over the next five years, and the answer is almost always AI. But the financial infrastructure to support it is still stuck in the past”

AI may be in the spotlight, but it’s not the only area where outdated systems are holding institutions back. As regulatory demands intensify and risk management grows more complex, legacy systems aren’t just slowing innovation, they are also turning compliance into a costly, constant struggle that patching can’t resolve.

Compliance under pressure

Financial institutions are under mounting pressure to adapt to new and evolving frameworks – such as DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), ISO 20022, and real-time regulatory mandates. These frameworks demand more dynamic risk controls, faster auditability, and policy orchestration at scale. Yet, most compliance processes remain hard-coded and manually maintained, making updates slow, costly, and complex.

For global banks with extensive interdependent systems, DORA presents a particular challenge. Demonstrating resilience across all critical information technology services requires a level of orchestration that fragmented legacy systems can’t deliver. Siloed data, overlapping risk controls, and disconnected workflows turn compliance into a high-stakes stress test.

So, what’s the alternative?

When policies, risk controls, and workflows are embedded directly into an infrastructure that is dynamic, orchestrated, and auditable by design, compliance ceases to be a bottleneck and instead starts becoming a strategic advantage. This is the direction leading financial institutions are moving in:

• Launching modular propositions in new markets without re-architecting for each region
• Adapting to shifting risk and fraud signals in real time, not in retrospective batch cycles
• Embedding governance into every product flow, instead of managing it from the sidelines

In the next era of finance, execution won’t be driven by standalone software or point solutions. It will be driven by financial infrastructure that can adapt to business intent, customer behaviour, and regulatory shifts, without slowing down.

The new infrastructure for adaptive finance

The future of finance isn’t another core platform or Cloud-wrapped monolith. It’s a structural reset. Adaptive Financial Infrastructure (AFI) is XYB’s answer: a composable, intelligent, event-driven platform that helps institutions move from strategy to execution without lengthy development cycles or a full rebuild. Whether it’s launching in new markets, embedding AI models, or orchestrating data across third-party systems, AFI turns strategy into action. The XYB componentised banking platform is open, transparent, and built to work alongside existing systems – until you’re ready to move beyond them entirely.

Derek Joyce, CEO at XYB sums up the core challenge facing financial institutions today: “XYB exists because banks can’t keep building tomorrow’s products on yesterday’s systems. Our mission is simple: create infrastructure that adapts, thinks, and evolves in real time, so financial institutions can stop patching and start progressing.”

For years, banking transformation has been framed as a choice between two unsatisfying paths: patch the legacy system or replace it entirely. But in a market that moves in real time, neither approach goes far enough or fast enough. The institutions that will define the next decade of finance won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones with the clearest execution paths for delivering adaptive products. The solutions that understand financial infrastructure can be a strategic enabler – flexible enough to adapt, intelligent enough to respond, and open enough to scale alongside change.

This is the shift Adaptive Financial Infrastructure makes possible. It’s the financial infrastructure that grows with you, not against you.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #35, Page 50-51