Winning with Essence: Enabling Banks to Adapt, Evolve & Thrive, Siobhan Byron, EVP, Finastra Universal Banking

By Puja Sharma

In conversation with Siobhan Byron, EVP, Finastra Universal Banking, we explore how Tonik and Oro Bank are scaling faster, cutting costs, and unlocking AI-driven personalisation on Finastra’s cloud-first core, Essence—and how the Symbiosis strategy is helping both digital spinouts and established banks modernise with agility.

What role does Essence play in helping digital banks like Tonik and Oro Bank succeed, from their launch to sustaining growth — which are the key aspects to which you ascribe the success of the projects in the IBSi DBA Awards?

At the onset, I’d like to congratulate Tonik and Oro Bank for their bold vision and transformative impact across Southeast Asia. We’re proud to be their partner of choice, enabling innovation through Finastra Essence — our flagship core banking platform and helping our clients reimagine banking.

Finastra Essence, built on and cloud technologies, combined with rich functional capabilities, has been instrumental in propelling Tonik and Oro bank’s growth .

What stands out for Tonik is the flexibility that Essence provides, enabling them to launch new products swiftly, reduce operational costs fivefold in the past 2 years, and expand its loan portfolio sevenfold — all while enabling real-time access to core banking data for AI-driven personalisation. Essence’s no code product composer and ability to blend functionalities from different areas of financial services has been a key enabler of product innovation.

Oro Bank’s journey is equally inspiring. As APAC’s first full-reserve digital bank, it’s a catalyst for growth in Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City SAR. With Essence’s cloud-native and open architecture, Oro Bank launched globally in just six months, seamlessly integrating with fintech partners and digital channels. Essence’s open REST APIs and modularity have also been instrumental in Oro bank’s fast integration and time to market.

Ultimately, Essence to move fast, stay agile, and innovate continuously — and that’s what the IBSi DBA Awards celebrate.

“Finastra Essence, built on modern microservices and cloud technologies, has supported Tonik and Oro Bank’s growth by giving Tonik the flexibility to launch new products quickly, cut operational costs fivefold, expand its loan portfolio sevenfold in two years, and enable real-time access to core banking data for AI-driven personalisation.” — Siobhan Byron, EVP, Finastra Universal Banking

In your view, how is core banking evolving in the current landscape of open finance, embedded services, and digital-first expectations?

Core banking has always been foundational, but now it is becoming a strategic enabler of innovation, agility, and customer-centricity. In today’s landscape, where open finance and embedded services are reshaping how financial products are consumed, banks are under pressure to deliver more than just stability — they must deliver adaptability.

Customers now expect their financial experiences to be instant, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into their digital lives. This shift is pushing banks to rethink their core systems —not just in terms of functionality, but in terms of architecture. Banks are increasingly adopting microservices and API-first design principles while that can evolve with market demands, integrate with fintech ecosystems, and support rapid innovation.

Cloud technology is a key enabler of this transformation. While many banks are embracing cloud-native solutions to gain scalability and resilience, on-prem deployment is still a preferred approach in many regions. What’s important is that banks have the flexibility to choose the deployment model that aligns with their operational and strategic goals, and Essence allows them this flexibility.

Ultimately, core banking is evolving into a platform for possibility. It is no longer just about processing transactions — it is about enabling banks to rapidly respond to change, collaborate across ecosystems, and deliver meaningful value to customers in a digital-first world.

How are you working to develop your offerings further – can you tell us what’s in the pipeline?

Ongoing innovation is central to how we evolve our core banking platform, Essence. It combines deep, end-to-end banking functionality with modern, flexible technology to help financial institutions reimagine how they deliver value. Essence is designed for seamless interoperability with an open API-first architecture and a growing partner ecosystem. We are expanding globally and locally — bringing new capabilities to market faster, together.

We are embedding intelligence across the banking journey — from insight-rich dashboards to GenAI-powered assistants like Essence AIAssist, which gives employees instant, conversational access to platform knowledge. Our Retail Analytics engine drives predictive actions like churn reduction, product recommendations, and cashflow forecasting —continuously evolving for sharper outcomes.

We are advancing our roadmap for our clients under three strategic pillars: Adapt, Evolve, and Thrive. This means helping banks adapt to a fast-moving financial landscape through AI-driven insights and composable architecture; evolve by solving new challenges with modular, resilient technology; and thrive by delivering seamless, digital-first experiences across retail, SME, and commercial banking — including Islamic banking.

One area we are focusing on is enabling our customers to upgrade their core banking system via a flexible and modular strategy. The traditional ‘rip and replace’ method can come with prolonged timelines, high costs, and operational disruption. This is necessary and unavoidable sometimes. However, in addition, we are also offering our customers a Symbiosis approach, where a next-generation core banking system is deployed alongside existing infrastructure, enabling rapid innovation while minimising costs and disruption. Essence allows banks to replace individual components instead of the entire system at once, meaning they do not need to invest in another system. Using microservices architecture and APIs, features like lending or Islamic banking can be quickly integrated.

What is your take on how usage of AI and analytics are shaping the banking industry? How does Finastra Universal banking align with this?

AI and advanced analytics are fundamentally reshaping banking — moving it from reactive service delivery to proactive, insight-driven engagement. Banks are using AI not only to automate routine tasks but to unlock deeper customer understanding, enabling more personalised, timely, and relevant experiences. Our recent Financial Services State of the Nation survey reflects this momentum: 61% of financial institutions reported improving their AI capabilities in the past year — nearly double the figure from 2022.

At Finastra Universal Banking, we see AI as a strategic layer across our solutions. From AI-powered dashboards that surface actionable insights to agentic AI assistants that enhance productivity and decision-making, we are embedding intelligence across the banking value chain. Our recent launch of Essence AIAssist is a great example — giving users, i.e. bank employees instant, conversational access to platform knowledge, powered by GenAI. Finastra Retail Analytics, our insights and recommendation engine supports predictive and prescriptive use cases such as customer churn prediction, next-best product recommendations, and cashflow forecasting.

We are also investing in AI beyond our products. Internally, we have rolled out Microsoft Copilot, launched upskilling programs, and hosted a GenAI learning festival to ensure our teams are equipped to innovate responsibly and effectively.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the banking sector and how do you as Finastra help institutions address it?

One of the biggest challenges facing banks today is keeping pace with rapid change while managing uncertainty. Technology offers immense opportunity but also introduces complexity — from evolving job roles and regulatory demands to operational risk. At Finastra, we help institutions turn this challenge into a catalyst for transformation.

Banks must embrace change and adapt strategies to stay competitive and meet customer needs. Our solutions and experts help institutions foster a culture of change and adopt technology and robust risk management. Essence’s modularity supports incremental transformation and helps banks reduce operational risk, accelerate product launches, and improve customer engagement. At Finastra, we make banking more accessible, efficient, and personalised, ensuring progress benefits individuals and communities.

For banks to stay agile enough to truly reimagine banking, we think it comes down to the following areas: embracing Symbiosis, tapping into ecosystems, and utilising technology and data to augment human experiences. This is where we believe we will see the best opportunities for us and our customers.