Two Worlds: What Legacy and Neo Each Underestimate About the Other

Architecture is usually filed under technology. Daniele Tonella, CTO and Member of the Management Board at ING, argues it belongs on the commercial side too. Architectural choices bind an organisation for the long term, and so do decisions about which products are offered in which markets, what is centralised and what is devolved — which is why the bank runs business architecture governance alongside the technical kind.

Prioritisation, not politics, is the barrier worth naming. Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq, describes a flat organisation with clean decision lines where ideas carry no hierarchy provided they arrive with data behind them, and where the ordering question is always what users are actually asking for.

Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, has worked both sides of this divide and finds each underestimates the other. Challengers move fast and frequently misjudge the weight of regulatory and compliance work. Incumbents understand that weight intimately and undervalue speed. Both, though, tend to land on the same false choice, and Cornel names it. His more useful frame is the one-way door and the two-way door — a way of deciding which calls deserve an experiment and which deserve the deliberation.