By Sundararajan S, Co-founder & CEO, of i-exceed
Is your bank truly digital – or just digitally wrapped?
The era of static banking is behind us. While digitization has transformed how financial products are delivered, the systems powering them remain stubbornly rigid. This disconnect is widening the gap between what customers expect – instant, personalized experiences – and what most banks can deliver.
It’s not a question of intent. Banks have ambition and vision. What holds them back is the weight of legacy infrastructure technology built for stability, not for speed or adaptability.
By 2026, over half of the world’s population will use digital banking. As this shift accelerates, customers are becoming more discerning: nearly 80% say they would switch to a bank that better meets their needs. Yet, many financial institutions are bound by complex delivery processes that turn a simple user request into a multi-month project.
So, banking ends up feeling slow, feels delayed, detached, and distant from customer realities. The real challenge today is not technology itself, but strategy – the ability to reimagine personalization beyond targeted marketing, toward adaptive, intelligent financial experiences.
Because in the age of AI and low-code innovation, personalization isn’t a luxury. It’s the new baseline of trust.
What does a modern bank really look like today?
The answer depends on where you stand. For customers, modern banking is instant, invisible, and intuitive – a seamless tap, a scan, a click. For banks, it’s an ever-evolving race to keep pace with rising expectations.
Take India, for instance. In July 2025, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processed nearly 19.5 billion transactions – a clear signal that customers no longer see speed and reliability as luxuries; they see them as the bare minimum. Yet, behind the sleek mobile apps and fast payments, many banks are still anchored to quarterly release cycles and manual processes that slow innovation.
To thrive in this landscape, banks don’t need to rip out their core systems. What they need is configurability – the ability to re-engineer services to be more agile, composable, and responsive. By making their systems configurable rather than fixed, banks can launch products faster, adapt policies in real time, and reduce the cost and complexity of change.
What does the present day modern banking system look like:
The answer depends on where you stand. For customers, Digital banking solutions need to be instant, invisible, and intuitive – a seamless tap, a scan, a click. For banks, it’s an ever-evolving race to keep pace with rising expectations.
In India, for example, UPI transactions touched 20.7 billion in October 2025, showing that customers now expect payments to be instant and reliable. What was once a luxury i.e. speed and dependability – has become the standard.
Yet, behind the sleek mobile apps and fast payments, many banks are still anchored to quarterly release cycles and manual processes that slow innovation. To thrive in this landscape, banks don’t need to rip out their core systems.
What they need is configurability – the ability to re-engineer services to be more agile, composable, and responsive. By making their systems configurable rather than fixed, banks can launch products faster, adapt policies in real time, and reduce the cost and complexity of change.
The gap between expectation and reality is already visible. Only 23% of users say they receive tailored financial advice – a sharp reminder of how personalization still lags behind promise. Meanwhile, mobile-banking leaders now resolve over 80% of customer interactions entirely in-app proving that when experiences are simplified, efficiency follows.
The idea of the Configurable Bank is built on this shift – where technology, powered by low-code and AI, transforms banking into a living, adaptive platform. One that learns, evolves, and personalizes at scale – not by replacing the core, but by reimagining how it connects with everything around it.
Low-Code: The Quiet Revolution Powering Banking’s Next Leap
What if banks could innovate at the speed of their customers? That’s exactly what low-code ecosystems make possible. Unlike traditional systems that demand complex rewrites and long development cycles, low-code platforms empower banks to evolve continuously – to adapt, refine, and personalize without rebuilding from scratch.
This is not just a technology shift; it’s a strategic one. With low-code, innovation is no longer the privilege of IT alone. Business teams, product leaders, and even customer-facing units can now shape and deploy digital experiences in near real time. This leads to faster time-to-market, reduced cost of change, and a culture of agility that keeps pace with rising customer expectations.
As financial products and digital experiences merge, configurability becomes the new differentiator. The banks that harness low-code to reimagine and reconfigure at will, will lead the next era of intelligent, adaptive banking – while others remain anchored in legacy systems built for a slower age.
The Real-World Impact of Configurable Banking
What happens when banking becomes as adaptive as its customers? That’s the promise of configurable banking – where technology bends to business needs, not the other way around. These systems are quietly redefining how banks deliver value, powering omnichannel experiences, optimizing product bundles, and creating unified data platforms that offer a 360-degree view of every customer interaction.
By treating banking as a composable ecosystem, low-code environments embed governance, compliance, and accountability directly into the fabric of operations. This gives cross-functional teams the freedom to innovate – safely, consistently, and in full alignment with regulatory expectations.
The impact goes far beyond efficiency. Imagine a savings plan that automatically adjusts to a customer’s income drop, helping them stay disciplined even in uncertain times. Or a payment journey that flexes with seasonal cash flows for SMEs and MSMEs – protecting liquidity while maintaining credit balance. Configurable systems make such adaptability real, not theoretical.
In practice, this means faster onboarding, contextual interfaces, and workflows fine-tuned to every customer segment – leading to quicker rollouts, fewer integration headaches, and a marked reduction in legacy code dependency. It’s not just modernization – it’s personalization at scale. The transition to configurable banking represents a fundamental reimagining of institutional agility. When banks can orchestrate change through composition rather than construction, they unlock compounding advantages: faster market responsiveness, reduced technical debt accumulation, and the capacity to treat every customer interaction as an opportunity for intelligent adaptation rather than standardized transaction processing.
Using AI-in digital banking solutions
What happens when intelligence becomes built into the very fabric of banking? AI doesn’t just enhance operations – it reimagines what’s possible. When combined with low-code platforms, AI transforms configurability into a competitive advantage. It enables adaptive credit scoring that learns from real-time behavior, self-streamlining KYC journeys that cut onboarding time, and contextual service flows that respond instantly to customer needs.
This fusion of AI and low-code allows banks to assemble omnichannel experiences that are at once personalized, compliant, and scalable. It’s the foundation of ecosystem banking – a model where open interfaces invite collaboration, co-creation, and continuous innovation.
As banks adopt the design principles of modern digital systems – open standards, low cost-to-serve, and developer-friendly integration – they move closer to becoming living platforms. We’ve already seen how UPI redefined “real-time” in financial transactions; now, the next leap lies in making “real-time” synonymous with real relevance – banking that learns, adapts, and evolves with every interaction.
An outlook of the future
It’s a shift from static releases to continuous evolution, from siloed projects to integrated digital ecosystems, and from generic products to deeply personalized experiences. The winners in this new era will be those who combine speed with structure – delivering innovation without compromising on governance, reliability, or compliance.
For forward-looking banks, low-code and modular architectures will not be tactical shortcuts; they will be strategic foundations. These systems embed adaptability at the core, allowing institutions to reduce transformation costs, launch new services faster, and personalize at scale – all while staying secure and compliant.
The opportunity is clear: to design banking systems that are flexible by design, intelligent by default, and human at the center. In this new landscape, banks won’t just keep pace with change – they’ll shape it.