As of this week, the plumbing has stopped being the point. Mambu wired agentic AI into its core, PSD3 edged closer to the Official Journal, and BaaS finally started sounding like a regulated business model. Here is what that means for anyone still shipping APIs in 2026. Open banking spent seven years being sold as a plumbing story. Standardised APIs, third party providers, screen scraping out, PSD2 in, the future is composable. As of September 2026, that pitch is quietly bein

An interview with David Firth by Sean Murphy Around four in five of the calls landing in one high street bank's contact centre are not complaints, fraud or lost cards. They are people trying to make sense of a transaction they can’t recognise. The payment is almost always one of their own but a week later they have already forgotten and the transaction description is often a nonsensical collection of letters and numbers with no location and no memory to hang it on. Multiply t

Mambu ships an AI-native core, Temenos moves a Vietnamese giant to hybrid cloud, and Brussels edges PSD3 closer to the finish line. Welcome to the week open banking and core modernisation collided.

As of this week, the core banking modernisation trade is no longer a "brave CIO" story. It has hit profitability, priced-in cheques and a regulatory calendar that will not wait. The week the category found its floor For a decade, cloud-native core banking has been the sector everyone said would win eventually. As of late August 2026, "eventually" arrived. Between a £40m growth cheque, a $100m ARR milestone and a European regulator finally putting a stamp on the successor to P