The migration challenge and 'heart transplant' analogy

Core banking is no longer a back-office topic.

Cloud, payments, AI and digital assets are forcing banks to rethink the foundations of how money moves.

In this episode, Arjun sits down with Vishal Dalal, Global CEO of Pismo, to unpack the evolution of modern core banking, the rise of cloud-native architectures, and why migration, resilience and payments complexity are the real bottlenecks shaping the future.

From a startup getting thrown out of buildings in Brazil to powering global banks across 70 plus countries, Vishal breaks down the hard truths of building critical infrastructure in a world that expects zero downtime, instant scalability and absolute safety.

In this episode:

• How Pismo went from a 5,000-card pilot to powering tens of millions of accounts

• Why resilience, recovery and disaster readiness are now core banking table stakes

• The real challenges of migrating 200 million accounts from legacy systems

• Why every country building its own payment rails increases global complexity

• How stablecoins, tokenized deposits and CBDCs force a rethink of the entire backend

• Why digital assets and real-time settlement are pulling core banking into a new era

• How AI is reshaping migrations, operations, debugging and developer speed

• Why being cloud-only opens some markets and immediately disqualifies others

• How leaders should balance velocity with safety in a geopolitical environment full of risk

👉 Watch now to understand the next chapter of core banking.

#CouchonomicsWithArjun #Banking #CoreBanking #Fintech #Payments #Cloud #AI #DigitalAssets #Stablecoins #CBDC #Migration #FutureOfFinance #Innovation

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Couchonomics with Arjun Season 04 is brought to you by:

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Chapters

00:00 The Pismo origin story and early Brazil journey

02:00 Winning trust through a 5,000-card pilot

04:00 Landing Itaú and scaling to millions of accounts

06:00 Citi’s 76-country ledger and going global

08:00 What modern core banking must deliver today

12:00 The realities of migrating from legacy mainframes

16:00 Payments rails, localization and rising global complexity

20:00 How digital assets, stablecoins and CBDCs reshape the backend

26:00 AI’s impact on migrations, operations and developer speed

34:00 Why safety, resilience and governance

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