Redefining Core Banking for the Next Era of Financial Services

As financial institutions recalibrate for a post-digital, AI-native world, the pressure is mounting to evolve beyond homegrown application and deliver real-time, secure, and highly performant banking experiences. Today, the conversation has moved from whether to modernize, to how fast and how effectively banks can re-architect their digital core to keep pace with rising demands.

In today’s landscape, high-performance core banking is no longer optional—it’s a necessity.

The Shift from Modernization to Performance-Driven Transformation

Over the past decade, banks have heavily invested in modernization initiatives. However, these efforts have often introduced new complexities, such as fragmented architectures, increased data processing latency, heightened cybersecurity threats, and greater operational challenges.
What’s becoming clear now is that true transformation delivers measurable performance outcomes—including enhanced customer experience, faster operations, improved cost efficiency, and increased trust.
This shift requires more than just cloud migration or digital channel upgrades; it demands a fundamental rethinking of the technology on which core banking systems are built and run.

Building a bankable future with a digital-first core

A modern digital-first core can help banks drive superlative customer experiences, faster product launches, and innovative products and services to compete with digital native banks. Co-creation and partnership opportunities driven by creating open ecosystems can help banks seamlessly connect with third-party providers to unlock new revenue opportunities. Some of the must-have attributes for a modern digital core include:

• Cloud-first approach: By moving to a cloud-first approach and adopting a cloud-native architecture, banks can become more agile and competitive, enabling the bank to quickly scale their infrastructure based on business demands.
• Composability: By shifting to a composable core, traditional banks can match services at the speed and scale offered by digital incumbents, providing the flexibility to compose and recompose while offering the ability to connect with best-of-the-breed solutions.
• DevOps-led approach: A DevOps-led core modernization approach helps banks better manage the core transformation process and reduce the risk of core modernization failures, ensuring better time to implementation and reliability of product releases.
• Extensive automation: Extensive automation can help banks drive the lower cost-to income ratio and enable banks to drive operational efficiencies from systems to processes.
• Data-driven core: A data-driven core is helping banks leverage data and AI to hyper-personalize customer experiences by offering personalized recommendations, thus, helping the banks to take more effective business decisions aimed at profitability.
• Open APIs: By shifting to a digital-first core driven by Open APIs, banks now can open up their ecosystems and explore new business models, offering their customers new products and services and unlocking new revenue opportunities.

Platforms like IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5, combined with Infosys Finacle’s modern, open, and composable core banking suite, represent this shift. Together, we enable banks to:

• Deploy and upgrade solutions flexibly as per their business priorities
• Scale flexibly across hybrid, cloud, and containerized environments
• Gain a foundation of robust functional capabilities, modern architecture, and proven delivery expertise to scale digital transformation
• Run critical workloads with ultra-low latency and near-zero downtime
• Secure sensitive financial data with enterprise-grade confidentiality and quantum-safe encryption
• Integrate AI at the core to drive intelligent decisioning in real-time

This partnership is not just for digital banking but for autonomous, AI-powered banking ecosystems of the future.

What This Partnership Enables Goes Far Beyond Robust Functionalities and Infrastructure

By delivering a high-performance, secure, and AI-ready foundation, Infosys Finacle and IBM LinuxONE aren’t just powering banks, they’re enabling a new era of banking possibilities. This isn’t just about better systems, it’s about unlocking new possibilities:

• Launching digital-first banks in record time
• Making advanced AI capabilities accessible to every business unit
• Onboarding customers in minutes, not days
• Expanding globally while staying compliant locally
• Offering ‘always-on’ services, even in the face of outages
• Offering fewer servers, simpler infrastructure, and lower total cost of ownership
• Where application and infrastructure security are built in, not added on

The Path Forward: A Core Built for the Future

As financial services enter an era of continuous transformation, success will favour those institutions that treat digital transformation not as a cost but as a catalyst.

The combination of Infosys Finacle and IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 offers banks a strategic foundation to:

• Deliver seamless, scalable customer experiences
• Innovate faster with trusted AI
• Operate securely, efficiently, and without compromise

This is more than an upgrade. It’s a redefinition of what core banking can be in the next decade.

Are You Ready to Lead?

Please reach out at Ran.vijay@edgeverve.com (Ran Vijay Pandey | Global Alliance Manager, Infosys Finacle)

The future of banking isn’t just digital. It’s intelligent, secure, and built on performance