Cloud and Microservice architecture was up until recently ‘cutting edge’. This is rapidly changing as the cutting edge becomes mature, accepted practice. Cloud vendors are now working closely with regulators, and they are also doubling down on their infrastructure as the networks become faster and more reliable. Many banks have already deployed production systems into cloud environments. Organisations that dominate the mainframe space are waking up to this, with IBM’s recent announcement of the launch of the ‘worlds first financial services-ready public cloud’. Tooling and frameworks are emerging that bring the once theoretical side of distributed computing into common practice, such as Kubernetes, Istio and Kafka. Building on this, the growing popularity of NewSQL databases such as Google Spanner and CockroachDB, which generally use quorum based consistency so that writes can be directed to any node, means that now the database can scale with the application, paving the way for true linear scalability. The cumulative result is that we are undoubtedly at the inflection point of the emerging fourth generation of core banking systems that targets the needs from the smallest of community banks to the largest of global tier-1 banks.