Beyond the challenger playbook: how incumbents can move faster without risking trust

Incumbents are protecting their most valuable asset: trust. So while disruptors have made real progress on digital app capabilities they’re nowhere near incumbents when it comes to trust, and surveys across every market back that up.

Speed and resilience don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It all depends on where that innovation is implemented. Disruptors have perfected speedy developing at app level. Incumbents can and must learn from this. But this is really just about a better UX to standard banking and payments activities. In our language, the app is too ‘cold’ for real product innovation. True transformation must go deeper, but doing it in the core infrastructure is risky: we say it’s too ‘hot’ and that’s why it is slow, risky and expensive. The solution to achieving speed with resilience is a Goldilocks innovation layer that goes deeper than the app but sits above the core. This delivers rapid progress without risking the stability and resilience of existing infrastructure.

If customers see you bringing everything together safely in one place, that trust becomes the foundation for moving faster rather than an excuse to move slower. Historically, both incumbents and challengers have been constrained by what’s possible within their existing architecture. Even neobanks are challenged by how fast they can ship new products – what’s behind the interface is often still constrained. What we’re excited about at Hyperlayer is enabling financial institutions of all types to deploy more rapidly by moving innovation outside the core.