Composable Banking: Buy, Build, or Orchestrate?
Every modernization conversation eventually reaches the same fork: buy an integrated suite, build in-house, or orchestrate best-of-breed components. The right answer is rarely one of them exclusively — it is knowing which to apply where.
Match the choice to the capability
Commodity capabilities — payments rails, KYC, card issuing — are usually best bought. Differentiating experiences — the ones customers actually notice — are worth building. Everything in between is a candidate for orchestration, where you compose vendors behind your own contracts.
Orchestration is the connective tissue
The reason "best-of-breed" earned a bad reputation was integration debt. A strong orchestration layer — one canonical data model, governed APIs and event choreography — is what makes composition sustainable instead of a spaghetti of point-to-point links.
Avoid the two failure modes
One trap is building what you should have bought; the other is buying a monolith that dictates your roadmap. A clear capability map keeps you out of both.
- Buy commodities, build differentiators, orchestrate the rest
- A real orchestration layer is what makes best-of-breed work
- Use a capability map to avoid over-building or over-buying
See it in your own environment
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