The next era of finance needs a new foundation

Why financial institutions can’t deliver on AI, compliance, or strategy without rethinking their architecture.

For years, banks have been told to transform. Modernise tech stacks. Rethink customer experiences. Move faster, integrate smarter, embed everywhere.

But despite ambitious roadmaps and significant investments, many financial institutions remain stuck. Not for lack of vision, capability, or funding, but because the very foundation they’re building on wasn’t designed for change.

Engineers are drowning in integration backlogs. Product launches stalled. Leadership is caught between patching outdated systems or committing to multi-year transformation programs that overpromise and underdeliver.

The real blocker? It’s not capability. It’s architecture. Until that changes, transformation will keep falling short.

The cost of standing still

Legacy systems, even those wrapped in cloud, were built for a different era - one that prioritised stability over agility and control over composability. Back then, products launched annually, customer expectations were predictable, and quarterly release cycles were enough to stay relevant.

But today’s market doesn’t move in predictable cycles. It moves in real time. Banks are expected to launch new products at speed, pivot to market shifts overnight, and connect seamlessly across fintechs, platforms, and partner ecosystems. Real-time finance demands real-time financial infrastructure, but that level of adaptability can’t run on rigid, siloed systems.

Why speed still wins

Today’s most profitable new financial providers didn’t win by offering radically different products. They won by offering them at the right time, and iterating fast enough to stay relevant.

In a market where customer needs shift quickly, and margins are under pressure, time-to-market has become a proxy for competitiveness. The providers able to respond to demand in weeks, not months, are the ones that earn customer loyalty repeatedly.

For larger, incumbent institutions, the challenge isn’t lack of ambition. It’s the inertia baked into complex systems, where every new product requires orchestration across teams, platforms, and approval layers that were never designed to move together.

This growing divergence in speed - between what strategy requires and what systems allow - is where the next wave of differentiation will play out.

The intelligence gap

Ask anyone in finance what will define their business over the next five years, and the answer is almost always “AI.” The ambition is real: predictive fraud detection, dynamic pricing, and hyper-personalised experiences. But the financial infrastructure to support it is still stuck in the past.

Despite 91% believing in its transformative impact, only 27% of banking executives say their organisation has the infrastructure to fully leverage it (Accenture). The gap isn’t ambition - its financial architecture.

Clean, connected, real-time data is required for intelligence-driven finance. But most banks are still grappling with dirty data, siloed systems, and brittle integrations. Proofs of concept are everywhere, but real outcomes are rare. Until financial architecture evolves to handle dynamic, event-driven processes, and real-time responsiveness, AI will remain a proof of concept, not a key differentiator.

AI may be in the spotlight, but it’s not the only area where outdated systems are holding institutions back. As regulatory demands intensify and risk management grows more complex, legacy systems aren’t just slowing innovation, they’re turning compliance into a costly, constant struggle that patching can’t resolve.

Compliance under pressure

Financial institutions are under mounting pressure to adapt to new and evolving frameworks - like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), ISO 20022, and real-time regulatory mandates. These frameworks demand more dynamic risk controls, faster auditability, and policy orchestration at scale. Yet, most compliance processes remain hard-coded and manually maintained, making updates slow, costly, and complex.

For global banks with extensive interdependent systems, DORA presents a particularly steep challenge. Demonstrating resilience across all critical information technology services requires a level of orchestration that fragmented legacy systems can’t deliver. Siloed data, overlapping risk controls, and disconnected workflows turn compliance into a high-stakes stress test that patching and workarounds can’t fix.

The alternative? When policies, risk controls, and workflows are embedded directly into an infrastructure that is dynamic, orchestrated, and auditable by design, compliance stops being a bottleneck and starts becoming a strategic advantage.

This is the direction leading financial institutions are moving in: 

• Launching modular propositions in new markets without rearchitecting for each region
• Adapting to shifting risk and fraud signals in real time, not in retrospective batch cycles
• Embedding governance into every product flow, instead of managing it from the sidelines

In the next era of finance, execution won’t be driven by standalone software or point solutions. It will be driven by financial infrastructure that can adapt to business intent, customer behavior, and regulatory shifts, without slowing down.

The new infrastructure for adaptive finance

The future of finance isn’t another core platform or cloud-wrapped monolith. It’s a structural reset. Adaptive Financial Infrastructure (AFI) is XYB’s answer: a composable, intelligent, event-driven platform that helps financial institutions move from strategy to execution without lengthy development cycles or a full rebuild.

Whether it’s launching in new markets, embedding AI models, or orchestrating data across third-party systems, AFI turns strategy into action. The platform is open, transparent, and built to work alongside your existing systems - until you’re ready to move beyond them entirely.

Derek Joyce, CEO at XYB sums up the core challenge facing financial institutions today:

“XYB exists because banks can’t keep building tomorrow’s products on yesterday’s systems. Our mission is simple: create infrastructure that adapts, thinks, and evolves in real time, so financial institutions can stop patching and start progressing.”

Final thoughts: financial infrastructure is the strategy

For years, banking transformation has been framed as a choice between two unsatisfying paths: patch the legacy system or replace it entirely. But in a market that moves in real time, neither approach goes far enough or fast enough.

The institutions that will define the next decade of finance won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones with the clearest execution paths for delivering adaptive products. The ones that understand financial infrastructure can be a strategic enabler - flexible enough to adapt, intelligent enough to respond, and open enough to scale alongside change.

This is the shift Adaptive Financial Infrastructure makes possible. It’s the financial infrastructure that grows with you, not against you.