The Intermediary –- May 2026 - Flipbook - Page 96
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
The core decision
geing wrong
emember that scene
in ‘This Is Spinal
Tap’, where the band
unveils a Stonehenge
stage prop that was
accidentally built
eleven inches tall instead of eleven
feet? It looks roughly like the real
thing and has the same general shape,
but as soon as it arrives on stage,
comedy ensues.
I think about that scene a lot when
I talk to building societies evaluating
core banking platforms. The market
is full of systems that look the part:
cloud-based, slick dashboards,
Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs) on the pitch deck. But put them
into action and they start to fall short.
For building societies, the stakes
are particularly high. They hold
something big banks can’t replicate:
a member-owned model built on
R
trust, reinvestment and long-term
stability. However, that model is under
pressure. UK building societies hold
just 32% of market share overall, and
that drops to 24% among 18 to 34-yearolds, according to Moneyhub.
The Labour Government has
pledged to double the size of the
mutual sector, but scaling to meet that
ambition requires infrastructure that
can actually do what it claims.
2026 is the year the cost of standing
still finally exceeds the cost of change.
Still, many building societies are
sleepwalking into another era of
legacy – so what can they do to avoid
building their own core banking
Stonehenge model?
The trinity
There are three engineering properties
that a genuinely modern and scalable
core platform must be able to do
TOM BENTLEY
is chief revenue officer
at 10x Banking
structurally, or it isn’t what it claims
to be. I like to think of this as the
trinity of a true fourth-generation
core.
Get all three right and you have
a platform that can evolve at the
pace the market demands, which
as everyone knows is basically
lightspeed. If you miss on any of these,
you’ll introduce yourself to a core
ceiling you’ll spend the next decade
bumping your head against.
1. Genuine composability
Every core platform claims
composability, but few can actually
demonstrate it. True composability
means components can be assembled,
replaced and evolved independently,
without compromising the ledger’s
authority or your upgrade path.
It allows interactions to happen
through stable APIs and published
domain events, rather than hardcoded point-to-point integrations and
tangled dependencies.
One of the clearest pain points
in the mutuals sector right now is
the ability to change savings rates at
speed in response to Bank of England
The Intermediary | May 2026
