Banks Face Core Overhaul as Agentic Economy Takes Shape

Banks built so-called “Franken-core” systems over decades by layering product engines, channels, compliance tools, API gateways, data lakes and cloud migrations onto legacy ledgers. The architecture matters because AI agents, tokenized deposits and streaming money require real-time, conditional and atomic settlement, not overnight batches. Industry estimates cited by FinTech Futures put maintenance at 70% to 80% of large-bank IT spending — about 75 pence of every pound — leaving only 25 pence for AI, tokenization, new products and competitive differentiation.

In a June-to-July 2026 FinTech Futures series, contributor Dharmesh Mistry urged boards to define a 2030 target architecture, migration sequence, consolidation trigger and full risk budget. He cited tokenized-deposit work including GBTD in Britain, The Clearing House in the United States and EnsembleTX in Hong Kong as evidence that programmable settlement is moving beyond theory. Mistry argued an agentic economy could generate 1 billion transactions a day; at even 2 pence each, that would imply £20 million in daily processing costs, making batch-based cores economically and technically untenable.