The Real Hidden Cost Isn't Licensing, It's Dependency

The experience layer is where a bank's personality either exists or doesn't. Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq, describes an architecture that is flexible by design and relentlessly user-centric, where the way the product communicates is simply the way two people would talk to each other — a cultural fit rather than a design system.

What stops other banks getting there is rarely ambition. Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, names the cost that never appears on the business case: dependency. Licensing is a cost, infrastructure is a cost, and both are visible. Dependency shows up somewhere else entirely.

He walks through a sequence anyone in the industry will recognise. Customers ask for a feature. The core won't allow it, or the backend lacks the capability, or the digital platform constrains the UI, the UX, the data layer. The dependency turns into meetings, then escalations, then workarounds, then concessions extracted from a third party. Something that should have shipped in a fortnight takes three months, or lands on a roadmap and never arrives at all. It is normally logged as a risk. It is almost never calculated commercially, which, Cornel suggests, is precisely why it keeps happening.