Microservices Fixed the Infrastructure. The Harder Problem Was the People

Moving from a monolithic core to microservices delivers real agility in infrastructure terms. Daniele Tonella, CTO and Member of the Management Board at ING, has led exactly that transformation, and is candid that the harder residue sits elsewhere — in the belief, held widely enough to create friction, that every team's requirement is the universal requirement. Without a matching willingness to simplify, to remove, to skip, the technical flexibility exists but never gets unleashed.

Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, picks up the same thread from the dependency side. Organisations build around the constraints of their key systems until those constraints become the shape of the business, and waiting on the backend is untenable when neither customers nor regulators are waiting.

There is a quieter dependency he raises too, and it is one banks rarely price: knowledge. Going it alone means owning documentation, enablement and training well enough that people leaving does not take institutional memory with them — a standard set by cloud-first companies rather than by financial services. Shipping fast matters, he argues, but shipping on a solid foundation matters more, and he describes what the customers getting this right do differently before a project starts.