When Platforms Become Strategy: The Boardroom Imperative for Banks

Contents

• Why Platform Decisions Matter Now
• Platform Choices Directly Drive Business Impact
• Industry Signals
• What Can Banks Do?
• Portfolio Conversions: From Risky Leap to a Repeatable Playbook
• The Hidden Cost of Tech Debt
• Why Leading Banks Are Forcing the Leap
• AI Is Accelerating the Need for Full Transformation
• Transformation as the New Stability

“We must acknowledge that the past is no longer prologue. We cannot merely patch the pipes – we must replace them. Incremental change is not enough; we need to fundamentally rethink how we operate.”

– Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMC

In banking, technology choices were debated in IT steering committees, scoped by architects, and implemented cautiously over months or years. They were about “keeping the lights on,” not shaping the bank’s competitive future.

That world no longer exists.

Today, a bank’s platform is its business. The architecture beneath the products determines how quickly banks can launch, how deeply they can personalize, how easily they can adapt to regulation, and whether they can participate in emerging opportunities like AI-driven services or embedded finance.

This makes platform strategy a boardroom decision – whether the platform enables growth, competitive advantage, and long-term relevance.

Why Platform Decisions Matter Now

Three major forces have converged to make platform decisions board-level priorities:

Customer Expectations Have Shifted Permanently

Consumers benchmark every interaction against the best experiences they have anywhere: Amazon’s speed, Apple’s simplicity, Google’s personalization. McKinsey reports that 76% of customers get frustrated when companies fail to deliver personalized interactions¹. Customers have come to expect the same from their bank.

Fintechs Have Reset the Pace of Innovation

Digital-first players have shown that new products can go from idea to market in weeks. This growth can be attributed to modular, cloud-native architectures that allow the company to rapidly release new features and updates. Case in point is Revolut, that came to serve over 50 million users globally in just seven years².

Regulatory Pressure is Increasing and Getting More Technical

Regulators increasingly expect transparency, auditability, and customer control to be embedded in the infrastructure itself. For example, if implemented, the CFPB’s Section 1033 rule requires banks to deliver real-time customer data access via APIs, not just pledge transparency.

AI Demands Modern Foundations

Layer on the acceleration of AI, and the stakes climb even higher. AI thrives on modern infrastructure: clean, accessible data and the ability to integrate intelligence into real-time decision-making. Without that foundation, AI cannot be leveraged as a competitive tool.

Platform Choices Directly Drive Business Impact

Platform choices directly affect banks’ ability to grow, retain customers, and adapt. Four areas stand out as the most immediate and measurable:

Operating Cost

Legacy platforms accumulate hidden costs like duplication across systems and manual workarounds over time. Each new feature requires disproportionately high effort and testing. By contrast, modern, cloud-native platforms consolidate these functions, automate routine tasks, and reduce dependency on niche skills.

Customer Retention

Modern platforms enabling instant issuance, real-time personalization, and seamless service are now essential to retaining relevance and relationships.

Compliance Agility

Meeting accelerating regulatory requirements is less about policy and more about the infrastructure to implement them. Legacy systems create expensive compliance risks with siloed data and batch processing. Modern cores enable faster regulatory changes.

Speed of Execution

Fintechs are pushing multiple updates per day; traditional banks on legacy cores often struggle to do major releases quarterly. A modern platform creates a culture of experimentation where new features can be tested, iterated, and scaled rapidly.

Industry Signals

Across the banking landscape, the message is unmistakable: platform decisions have escalated into strategic imperatives.

• JPMorgan Chase, for instance, is not only modernizing its infrastructure but also beginning to charge fintechs for API data access, turning compliance into a potential profit centre.
• Meanwhile, Nubank’s full-stack control, from processing to interface, has empowered it to scale at rapid pace and deliver daily updates to over 100 million users³
• The Apple Card, launched with Goldman Sachs, exemplified born-digital execution, delivering seamless onboarding, real-time insights, and frictionless UX

What Can Banks Do?

Option 1: Do Nothing

Choosing to maintain the status quo might feel low-risk in the short term. However, legacy technology cost banks over $36 billion in 2022, with projected increases to $57 billion by 2028⁴. The longer banks defer modernization, the higher the cost of change becomes, as every patch and workaround compounds complexity.

Option 2: Layer On

Many banks have tried to sidestep full-scale modernization by layering APIs, middleware, or digital shells over legacy cores. This approach can deliver short-term wins like faster digital onboarding or new mobile features, but it rarely changes the fundamentals. In effect, layering buys time but doesn’t solve the underlying rigidity.

Option 3: Transform

True transformation means rebuilding on cloud-native, API-first platforms that eliminate the compounding drag of legacy systems. Modern platforms flip the cost curve by making each change cheaper and faster. They also unlock speed, enabling banks to match fintech-level innovation cycles. And they turn regulatory resilience from a costly burden into a built-in advantage.

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Portfolio Conversions: From Risky Leap to a Repeatable Playbook

For decades, the risks of core conversions were enormous: operational outages, data errors, and compliance gaps. The execution took multi-year programs, manual data mapping, and “big bang” cutovers where entire portfolios moved overnight.

Modern platforms have turned conversions into a repeatable, controlled process. Banks now have the tools to migrate portfolios with precision and confidence:

• API-based access to full datasets ensures that data can be validated continuously, not just at the point of migration.
• AI-assisted mapping and validation reduces human error and accelerates reconciliation, bringing down risk and cost.
• Phased rollouts and simulation environments replace the old “all at once” cutovers. Portfolios can be tested in parallel, piloted with select customer groups, and scaled progressively.
• Real-time monitoring and rollback tools give banks the ability to pause, adjust, or reverse a migration instantly if issues emerge.

The Hidden Cost of Tech Debt

Technology debt builds gradually when banks rely on patches, temporary fixes, or added integrations instead of addressing core limitations.

• Every workaround adds long-term drag: Each additional integration, script, or manual process makes the system harder to untangle and slows future change.
• Slower launches, more testing: Legacy systems stitched together with patches require exhaustive regression testing before any update can go live, delaying launches, eroding competitiveness and customer satisfaction.
• Developer fatigue and talent loss: Working on outdated, brittle platforms saps morale. Teams spend more time fixing and maintaining than building.
• Delays innovation and delivery: The cumulative effect of drag, testing overhead, and talent attrition is a slower organization.

Why Leading Banks Are Forcing the Leap

Growing complexity, higher costs, and rising expectations are making modernization a strategic priority. And leading institutions are moving with urgency.

Platform Is Now a Boardroom Conversation

What used to be a CIO decision is now firmly on the CEO and board agenda. The stakes are too high: platform choices shape growth potential, compliance readiness, and long-term competitiveness.

Focus Shifts to Simplification

Banks moving fast are realising that adding digital channels around a brittle core only multiplies complexity. Instead, the goal is simplification through clean architectures, unified data models, and fewer dependencies.

Delay Raises the Cost per Change

The cost of change climbs, technical debt compounds, regulatory demands intensify, and talent attrition accelerates as banks wait. Leading banks have recognized that acting now minimizes future costs and creates a foundation for agility.

AI Is Accelerating the Need for Full Transformation

• Faster adoption cycles: Cloud took ~15 years to mature in banking; AI has moved from pilots to enterprise deployment in just a few years, thanks to existing infrastructure.
• Lower barriers: Open-source models and APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Hugging Face) give banks instant access to advanced tools without building them from scratch.
• Massive momentum: Big tech and VCs are pouring billions into AI, with cross-industry adoption creating pressure for banks to keep pace.

Legacy, batch-driven cores can’t deliver real-time data or flexibility. Without modern platforms, banks risk being locked out of AI’s potential in personalization, risk, and efficiency.

Transformation as the New Stability

Banks have carried the weight of legacy systems for decades, but what was once a stabilizer is now a constraint. Customers, regulators, and AI are moving faster than legacy platforms can adapt, quietly eroding competitiveness. The way forward isn’t about discarding the past, but building modern, cloud-native foundations that make adaptability a strength. Transformation is no longer a risky leap—it’s how banks remain trusted and relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Let’s talk about how your bank can turn transformation into a competitive advantage. Connect with our experts today at <email>.

References

1. McKinsey | Unlocking the next frontier of personalized marketing | 2025
2. Revolut | Revolut hits 50 million customer milestone globally | 2024
3. Securities and Exchange Commission | Nubank surpasses 100 million customers | 2024
4. Yahoo Finance | Global Banks to Spend $57 Billion on Legacy Payments Technology in 2028, Impacting Costs and Limiting Growth | 2023