Sandeep Bhanote, global head and GM of GrowthX at DXC, joined Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston for a View from the Top conversation. The two discussed today's banking landscape, DXC's new platform, DXC CoreIgnite, and how AI will continue to impact the banking industry in the future.

1. First things first: Set the landscape — what's happening in banking today?

Bhanote: Consumers want more from their banks, but the banking industry is highly regulated. Banks have also had these battle-hardened technologies for 40+ years; they can't just change on a dime.

What we're working on at DXC is figuring out:

• How do we give banks the flexibility of a fintech, while maintaining and staying true to these technologies and being mindful of regulations?

2. The story: Tell us about DXC CoreIgnite.

Bhanote: DXC CoreIgnite helps banks launch and scale new services faster by reducing integration complexity across existing core banking systems.

• In e-commerce, merchants have pre-built solutions that sync right to the e-commerce site.

That doesn't exist in banking, but DXC CoreIgnite is delivering that capability to banks so they can move at the pace of a fintech.

3. Why now: What makes this moment the right time for a product like DXC CoreIgnite?

Bhanote: There's been a confluence of energies in the industry:

• AI coming to fruition.
• Money changing shape from physical currency to digital currency.
• Banking consumers wanting real-time access.

Banks need an interface by which they can participate in this new economy — to react and adjust to the demands of their consumer but do it in a way that doesn't break anything.

4. Okay, but: How do we bring these legacy banking systems into the 21st century?

Bhanote: Don't rip and replace. Instead, extend and deploy.

Hogan, our core banking platform, runs on IBM mainframes. Part of the problem is a lot of the engineers who worked on these systems in the '80s and '90s aren't with those banks anymore.

• The idea here is: How do we build on existing technologies and extend the value in the investments already made, without breaking anything that still works? Core systems remain core for a reason; they're workhorses.

5. The strategy: How important are partnerships to make this work?

Bhanote: Customers expect new innovations from banks; that makes these ecosystems and partnerships especially important.

• For example, banks want to be able to offer cryptocurrency capabilities to their customers.
• We created a partnership with Ripple, the leading provider of stablecoin-powered cross-border payments, where through DXC CoreIgnite, we can cascade that capability to our existing banking customers.

6. Looking ahead: All these technologies are moving so fast, especially with AI. What does this look like 12 months from now?

Bhanote: Banks typically think about transformation as these large "big bang movements." I don't think that's the case anymore.

• Particularly with AI, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? The idea is breaking down and delivering incremental and tangible wins; that's the opportunity here for banks.

Here's an example of what this might look like in the future:

• Think about your mortgage application. Imagine being able to have one mortgage application with one bank that knows all of your sources of funds.
• Instead of piles of paperwork, it's maybe three or four pages of information you fill out, but through AI, the bank can actually collate and collect all the necessary pieces of it.

The agentic aspect of it knows more about who you are within the four walls of that bank.

• This will enable the bank to do more loans and process more transactions, and there's no burden on the consumer.

7. Next steps: How does AI fit into DXC CoreIgnite?

Bhanote: AI is critical to what we're doing. Here's how we think about it:

• How do we deliver a delightful consumer experience using AI? Everyone has some form of chat AI on their phone for everything else in their life — why not their bank?
• How do we take knowledge that is in the mind of an engineer and institutionalize that for the bank so that we can deliver better engineering and developer capabilities, where they can now develop using AI at a faster clip?

We've got a number of banks that use our Hogan core banking platform today that are very interested in this topic and interested in using AI to deliver.

Learn more.