PSD3, Second Awards, and $100M Milestones: Core Banking's Coming-of-Age Summer

The EU is inches from publishing PSD3, Temenos just picked up its second consecutive Euromoney trophy while closing a marquee US bank deal, and Thought Machine crossed a nine-figure revenue threshold. Core banking modernisation is no longer a slide in a boardroom deck, it's the balance sheet.

If open banking's first act was regulators forcing banks to open their APIs, the second act now unfolding is banks quietly rebuilding the engine underneath. The last seven days delivered the clearest evidence yet: PSD3 is barrelling toward the Official Journal of the European Union, core-banking vendors are notching real wins with real institutions, and the composable, cloud-native stack is starting to look less like a marketing category and more like the default.

PSD3 and PSR: The Regulatory Countdown Enters Its Final Stretch

Start with the framework everyone in European payments has been tracking. On 22 April 2026, the proposed text of the Third Payment Services Directive (PSD3) and a new directly applicable Payment Services Regulation (PSR) were put before a meeting of national representatives for approval, according to legal analysis from Norton Rose Fulbright and Morrison Foerster. The agreed texts were published the following day.

The measures will repeal and replace the existing PSD2 and Electronic Money Directive

(EMD2) regimes with a single supervisory framework focused on harmonisation, fraud prevention, and, critically for readers of this section, strengthening open banking, as DLA Piper has summarised in recent client alerts.

The Timeline That Matters

Publication in the Official Journal of the European Union is currently anticipated for June or July 2026, though industry watchers including Freshfields note the date could slip to September. The new rules will generally apply 21 months after publication, meaning firms are looking at a live compliance date somewhere in Q1 or Q2 2028. That is not a long runway when you consider what PSD3 actually asks for.

What PSD3 Actually Changes for Open Banking

PSD3 introduces stricter risk-management requirements, improved transparency for consumers, and measures to support emerging payment methods and open-banking services, per Adyen's PSD3 knowledge hub. The under-appreciated shift: dedicated open-banking interfaces are being upgraded from a permissive framework to a set of much more prescriptive performance obligations. Banks that treated PSD2 APIs as compliance theatre are about to discover the difference between "we published an endpoint" and "our API meets a supervisory SLA."

For the TPP (third-party provider) side of the market, that's the good news. Yapily, Tink, TrueLayer, and Plaid have spent years complaining, with justification, that bank-side APIs were unreliable, unevenly documented, and often quietly rate-limited. PSD3 flips the leverage.

Temenos Wins Twice in One Month

Regulatory tailwinds only matter if someone is actually installing the software. On that front, this week belonged to Temenos. On 20 July 2026, Temenos announced it had been recognised as the World's Best Core Banking Solution in the Euromoney Awards for Excellence 2026, the second consecutive year, per GlobeNewswire.

That trophy came alongside two commercial data points that matter more than any award. First, a leading US regional bank has selected Temenos to modernise its core banking platform on Temenos SaaS, according to reporting in Financial IT. Second, Temenos completed its acquisition of additiv AG on 17 July 2026, expanding its wealth-management and embedded-finance capabilities in a market where those two categories are converging fast.

Why the US Regional Bank Selection Matters

The US regional-bank story is worth pausing on. American regional lenders have historically been the toughest sell for core replacement, the combination of aging Cobol stacks, tight IT budgets, and post-2023-crisis regulatory scrutiny has kept many of them in a "modernise the edges, don't touch the core" posture for a decade. A SaaS core selection at that segment is not an incremental win; it's a signal that the risk calculus has flipped.

Mambu and Thought Machine: The Challenger Stack Grows Up

Temenos is not the only vendor with news. Norwegian mortgage lender Eiendomskreditt has selected Knowit and Mambu to modernise its core banking platform, per fresh reporting on the deal — a marker that European specialist lenders are increasingly willing to adopt cloud-native cores rather than continue patching legacy systems.

And Thought Machine, the London-based challenger, disclosed that it has surpassed the USD 100 million total revenue threshold for the financial year ending December 2025, representing a 57% year-on-year increase in total revenue. For a category that spent most of the 2010s being described as "promising but unproven," a 57% growth curve at nine-figure revenue puts Thought Machine firmly in the "adult in the room" bracket alongside the incumbents.

What the Vendor News Adds Up To

Read together, these three data points describe a market that is no longer segmented cleanly between "legacy incumbent" and "cloud-native challenger." Temenos is doubling down on SaaS. Mambu is winning European specialist lenders. Thought Machine is scaling. Each is competing on cloud-native, API-first, composable terms, because the buyers now demand it.

The Open Banking Ecosystem Keeps Building

Zoom out to the broader ecosystem and the momentum is corroborating. Earlier in 2026, GFT and Ozone API announced a partnership to help Canadian financial institutions navigate the country's transition to open banking, aligning with the acceleration of Canada's Consumer-Driven Banking Act, per Fintech Global. As of mid-2026, there are 75 tracked open-banking API providers globally, per Open Banking Tracker's directory, including Plaid, TrueLayer, Tink, MX, Yapily, Salt Edge, and Finicity, each competing on regional coverage, AIS/PIS capabilities, and pricing.

Meanwhile in the US, Walmart's partnership with Fiserv to launch instant Pay-by-Bank for online and in-store purchases, highlighted in Federal Reserve commentary, is the sort of retail-scale deployment that turns "open banking" from a compliance box-tick into a payments channel with a merchant flywheel behind it.

The BaaS Backdrop: Bigger, Tighter, More Regulated

Underpinning all of the above is the maturing Banking-as-a-Service layer. The global BaaS market currently sits at roughly USD 35–45 billion in 2026, with annual growth in the 16–18% range, according to industry analysis from Softjourn and Sumsub. But the growth is now happening under a materially stricter regulatory regime: the 2026 Resilience Standard requires BaaS providers to maintain real-time atomic transaction reconciliation and 99.99% uptime for regulatory reporting nodes, and a Q1 2026 regulatory update mandated strict sub-ledger accounting protocols ensuring total fund segregation.

Established BaaS providers now include SDK.finance, Marqeta, Solaris, Galileo Financial Technologies, Treezor, and Intergiro, a shortlist that has consolidated meaningfully compared to the fragmented BaaS map of 2022. The sponsor-bank meltdown of 2023-2024 forced everyone to grow up. In 2026, "BaaS" and "boring" are no longer mutually exclusive descriptors, and that is precisely why it's working.

What This All Means for Core Banking Modernisation

Three takeaways worth pinning above your desk. First, the regulatory clock is now audible. Firms that have not yet scoped a PSD3 gap analysis have roughly 18 months of runway, call it 12 by the time procurement and vendor selection finish. Second, the vendor market is real. Temenos, Mambu and Thought Machine are all posting the kinds of wins and revenue that make procurement committees willing to bet careers on cloud-native cores. Third, BaaS and open banking are converging: the same infrastructure supports both, the same regulatory frameworks apply, and the same customer expectations: real-time, embedded, API-native, drive both.

What to Watch Next

Three items for your calendar. First, the actual publication date of PSD3 in the Official Journal, if June or July slips to September, the 21-month clock also slips, which meaningfully affects transformation programme roadmaps. Second, whether any Tier 1 European bank moves publicly to a full cloud-native core replacement in the next two quarters, that would be the true watershed moment. Third, the FCA's Q4 discussion paper on the first UK open-finance scheme, which will clarify whether the UK's post-Brexit divergence from EU rules is going to create competitive friction or competitive opportunity for cross-border TPPs.

The Bottom Line

Open banking's first act was about regulators forcing access. The second act, playing out on stage this week, is about incumbents rebuilding the technology stack that makes access performant, reliable, and monetisable. PSD3 provides the deadline, Temenos and Thought Machine prove the vendor market is ready, and Mambu's specialist-lender wins show the buying side has finally lost its fear of replacing the core. The 2028 finish line is closer than it looks.