Horizon 2030 for Banking: The Velocity Reality – Navigating Fintech Competition, with Dario Molinari
By Ali Paterson · 24 September 2026
In brief: Dario Molinari, Senior Solutions Architect at Red Hat, says the drive to migrate legacy applications to cloud has stalled under geopolitical and regulatory change, leaving institutions with on-premise infrastructure that has been surviving on elastic bands and glue. He describes the challenge of modernising with shrinking budgets, and suggests starting small, bringing people together and adopting
| Series | Horizon 2030 for Banking |
|---|---|
| Episode | The Velocity Reality: Navigating Fintech Competition |
| Speaker | Dario Molinari, Senior Solutions Architect, Red Hat |
| Topic | Legacy infrastructure and automation |
Quick Summary
In this episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat, Dario Molinari, Senior Solutions Architect, describes the position many financial institutions find themselves in as cloud migration stalls, and suggests automation as a common language for modernisation.
What Has Changed for Financial Institutions?
Dario works with financial services institutions that have large legacy on-premise environments. The drive over recent years, he explains, has been to migrate slowly evolving legacy applications to cloud. With recent geopolitical and regulatory changes, he says that strategy is no longer an option, and the velocity institutions were beginning to acquire is stalling. They are finding that their on-premise infrastructure has been surviving on elastic bands and glue.
What Is the Challenge?
He describes the difficulty of modernising that estate and injecting new technologies such as AI onto end-of-life physical and systems infrastructure, while scaling the effort against ever-reducing budgets and a reduced ability to spend on operational expenditure. Mission critical, destabilising and constrained rarely come together comfortably, and regulation and risk add to the headache.
What Does He Suggest?
- Try small.
- Bring as many people across the organisation together as possible, or at least give them a common language.
- In Red Hat's case, make automation that common language.
The more tasks can be replicated across different technologies, and the more people have eyes on those tasks in a shared language, the easier he says it becomes to spot problems and to roll back from them.
Find Out More
Red Hat Summit Connect comes to London on 8 October, bringing together the people building the next generation of banking infrastructure. Find out more and register here.
Watch every episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat on FF News, starting with the series trailer.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Dario Molinari say cloud migration has stalled?
He attributes it to recent geopolitical and regulatory changes, which have made the strategy of migrating legacy applications to cloud no longer an option for many institutions.
What challenge does he describe for on-premise infrastructure?
Modernising end-of-life physical and systems infrastructure and adding technologies such as AI, while budgets and operational spending continue to shrink.
What does he mean by automation as a common language?
Using automation across different technologies so tasks can be replicated and more people can see them, making it easier to spot problems and roll back.