Open Heart Surgery or Keyhole? Rethinking the Core Replacement

Vendor lock-in is not a risk to be avoided, it is a condition to be chosen well. Daniele Tonella, CTO and Member of the Management Board at ING, is unsentimental about it: the moment you select a vendor you are locked in, and open source only buys degrees of portability. Sometimes lock-in is even an advantage, and he explains the circumstance in which that is true.

Speed of decision is a separate problem from speed of technology. Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq, describes an operating model built on clear ownership at every level, where decisions land in forty-eight hours or two weeks rather than months or years, and where the technology rather than the hierarchy is usually the thing slowing you down.

The industry's default metaphor for core replacement is open heart surgery, and Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, sets out why that framing produces the outcomes it does. All-or-nothing programmes attract committees, deliberation and years of elapsed time, and the world at the end looks nothing like the world at the start. What he is seeing more of now is keyhole surgery - a remittances app, an FX product, one defined use case delivered at speed, with the feedback loop closing while the appetite still exists.