Building on this it is important that the next generation of banking systems should be conservatively scoped. The mainframe systems suffer from having their core ‘hollowed out’ making them too dumb. The third generation systems suffer from being too tightly coupled to their interfaces making them a black box, and a result, difficult to change. An emerging term banks are using to describe their transformation needs is the ‘headless core’.

Building on this it is important that the next generation of banking systems should be conservatively scoped. The mainframe systems suffer from having their core ‘hollowed out’ making them too dumb. The third generation systems suffer from being too tightly coupled to their interfaces making them a black box, and a result, difficult to change. An emerging term banks are using to describe their transformation needs is the ‘headless core’.

To help visualize what a fourth generation system should look like we take a look at some typical capabilities of the previous generation systems: