It's Not the Big That Eats the Small Anymore, It's the Fast That Eats the Slow

No bank builds on empty ground. Daniele Tonella, CTO and Member of the Management Board at ING, opens the series with an image that anyone who has tried to modernise a large institution will recognise: laying a road across a city that has already been built. The straight line is rarely available, and every decision has to be inserted into a universe assembled over the last twenty or thirty years.

There is another route, and Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq, describes it — a bank built from the core stack outward and owned end to end, with no inherited architecture in the way. It buys real nimbleness. It also means owning all of it, which is its own form of legacy in waiting.

What has changed, argues Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, is the cost of moving slowly. The core was never meant to be fast; it is the custodian of customer records and transaction history and it should be stable. But customer expectations now shift week to week, and boards are recalculating risk accordingly. A year to ship used to be acceptable. Cornel explains what it means now, when the competitor ships in three.