Banking and Payments

What is changing

Banks are being asked to settle faster, explain more and spend less, on cores written before the first smartphone. The institutions pulling ahead are not the ones with the boldest plans. They change one product at a time and keep every account open throughout.

Instant payments have turned the overnight batch into a liability. A transfer that once had until morning to settle now has seconds, and the systems around it were never built for that.

Supervisors want evidence, not assurances: traceable data, tested recovery and a named owner for every important service.

Three shifts we see in every bank we work with

Payments in real time
Instant schemes leave no overnight window to put mistakes right. Fraud checks, limits and reconciliation have to run in the same second as the payment.
Resilience you can prove
Supervisors now ask how long each important service may be down, and expect a tested answer. Recovery plans live in code, not in binders.
Cores that move in pieces
Few banks can afford a single large replacement. The ones succeeding carve products off the old core one at a time, behind stable interfaces.

By the numbers

Banking, measured

68%: Share of technology budget the banking leaders in our research spend keeping existing systems running, above the 61% average.
4x: Faster release cadence on the payments platforms we have rebuilt, measured a year after go-live.
0: Customer-facing freezes needed across our last six core banking migrations.
11 weeks: Average time from the first workshop to the first product live on a new core component.

The maintenance dividend, KIASA research, 2026 (24 of the 140 engineering leaders surveyed work in banking); KIASA delivery records, 2021 to 2026.

What we do

How we help banks and payment providers

Small senior teams who have worked inside banks, and who stay until your own people can run what we build together.

Core banking modernization
Deposits, lending and ledgers moved off aging cores product by product, with old and new running side by side until the numbers match.
Application modernization
Payments platforms
Instant, card and cross-border payments on one platform, with fraud scoring and limits that run inside the payment, not after it.
Integration and APIs
Regulatory data
One governed source for the figures you report, with lineage from each submission back to the transactions behind it.
Artificial intelligence and data
Operational resilience
Important services mapped, recovery tested on a schedule, and the evidence ready for the supervisor before they ask for it.
Cybersecurity
Digital channels
Mobile and web banking designed with customers, built by one team and released every week rather than every quarter.
Digital product engineering
Running the platform
A standing team that patches, monitors and improves what we build, and reports back each month in plain language.
Managed services

A tidy desk seen from above, with a monitor, keyboard and speakers.

Core modernization

Replacing a core without a weekend of silence

The traditional core replacement asks a bank to stop, migrate and hope. We do the opposite. A new component takes one product, such as savings or small business lending, while the old core keeps everything else.

Both run in parallel and reconcile every night until the figures agree to the cent. Only then do customers move, a few thousand at a time. There is no single cutover, and no single moment when everything can go wrong.

See application modernization

Payments

When settlement takes seconds, so must everything else

Instant payments remove the night the back office used to rely on. Sanctions screening, fraud scoring, limits and posting all have to finish before the customer's screen refreshes.

We design payment flows as a chain of small services with clear timeouts and a defined answer for every failure, so one slow check delays one payment instead of the whole queue.

See integration and APIs

Our work in action

What we have built with banks

What we think

Reading for banking leaders

See all insights

Our leaders