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

10x Banking bags £40m, Thought Machine crosses $100m ARR, and PSD3's countdown gets a little more real. As of this week, the modernisation trade has stopped being a thesis and started being a business. For years the core banking modernisation story sounded suspiciously like the flying-car story. Ambitious, well-funded, endlessly promising, and forever three years away from meaningful commercial traction. That framing no longer holds. Following this month's wave of vendor upda