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Time-to-Market: Why Your Core Sets Your Product Velocity

  • Writer: WAU Marketing
    WAU Marketing
  • Apr 9
  • 3 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Your product team isn't slow. Your core makes it slow. It's an uncomfortable distinction, because it means the problem isn't fixed by hiring people, but by changing the foundations.


In financial services, the speed to launch a product is rarely limited by creativity or talent. It's limited by the platform that product has to run on. And the numbers are blunt: what takes a week on a modern core can take months on a legacy one. That difference isn't an engineering detail; it's the difference between capturing a market and watching it pass.


How much it slows you, in numbers


McKinsey measured it with uncomfortable precision. A simple function—a change of address in the app, say—can take 40 to 100 person-days of work on a legacy core, versus a little over a week on a next-generation one, according to its analysis of next-generation core banking platforms. A complex function—suspending and reissuing a card—can take more than a year on the old system against a month or less on the modern one. And when the institution has a good catalog of APIs-as-products, going from concept to production takes 30 to 60 days. McKinsey estimates a solid continuous-delivery strategy can cut time-to-market by 50 to 75%.


It's not theory: the sector itself confesses. Research commissioned by 10x Banking in 2024, with 206 IT decision-makers, found that 55% of banks consider their current core's limitations the biggest obstacle to reaching their business goals, and that 93% agree their future success depends on choosing the right core, as 10x Banking reported. In separate research by the same vendor, conducted by Censuswide, 64% of banks admitted their slow digital transformation has already cost them new customers, according to 10x Banking.


Why the core, and nothing else, decides the speed


The reason is structural. A legacy core is monolithic and coupled: to change one piece you have to touch and re-test the rest, schedule maintenance windows, pray nothing else breaks. Each launch is a high-risk project. A modern core does the opposite: products are configured in a separate layer, capabilities are exposed and combined via API, and a change to one product doesn't force a rewrite of the engine. That's why one moves at the pace of a project and the other at the pace of configuration.


The contrast shows in who's winning. In Latin America, fintechs launch products up to three times faster than traditional banks, according to Galileo, while a traditional bank can take up to twelve months to release a new product. And the customer notices: around 76% of consumers would be willing to switch institutions for better digital services, per figures compiled by Latinia. Slowness isn't an internal problem that stays inside; it walks out the door with your customers.


The false dilemma: speed or compliance


Here comes banking's perennial objection: "we're slow because we're regulated." It's a half-truth, and the false half is the expensive one. DORA's research on engineering performance shows that the regulated industry is not, by itself, a barrier to high speed. What does slow you is depending on manual approvals: organizations with formal external approval processes are 2.6 times more likely to be low performers, according to DORA. The way out? Automating compliance controls instead of doing them by hand. And that's only possible on a modern core that allows it. Compliance isn't the excuse for slowness; the legacy core is.


The opportunity cost no one invoices


Every month a product takes to launch is a month without its revenue—and, worse, a month in which a faster competitor takes that space. In a market where fintechs launch three times faster, the slow bank doesn't compete on equal terms: it arrives when the customer has already chosen. Speed isn't a product luxury; it's the line separating the one who defines the market from the one who chases it.


How we see it at WAU


At WAU we build cores designed for speed: products configurable without rewriting the engine, capabilities exposed via API to combine fast, and automated compliance so regulation stops being the excuse for slowness. We don't help you "launch faster" through heroic effort; we change the foundations so that fast becomes the norm.


If your time-to-market feels slow and you suspect the bottleneck is the core, let's talk. We'll help you put a number on what the delay is costing you. 👉 Book a conversation with our team.


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