By: David Abbott, VP Cards, Payments & Strategic Accounts at Tuum
I don’t know about you, but I came away from the Payments Association’s PAY360 conference with a ton of value. Huge thanks to Tony and the team — a brilliantly managed event from start to finish.
Over the course of the show, I reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and joined a number of the plenary and breakout sessions. Some were great, others good, and a few — like the European Union Payments Briefing — a bit marginal. That said, it was encouraging to see the EU taking cues from the UK while still, unsurprisingly, doing things their own way.
As always with events like this, the full value often doesn’t hit you until something later clicks. That’s exactly what happened to me the following week — when a passing comment from a developer helped crystallise a lot of what I’d been hearing about legacy transformation.
Legacy vs Resilience: The PAY360 Discussion
One session on day one of the conference really stood out. Tucked away in the Delegate Village, the session focused on “overhauling legacy systems while maintaining resilience.” What followed was a thought-provoking silent-disco-style debate — headphones on, music off — between advocates of in-house builds and third-party platforms.
On the surface, both sides made strong points. Each path seemed viable, effective, and scalable. I walked away thinking both could work. But could they really?
Enter Akin: A Fresh Perspective from Estonia
A few days later, I was back in our London office when I met Akin, a software developer visiting from Estonia. He introduced himself as part of the “Landing” team — or so I thought. Turns out it was the Lending team (my bad — blame my ear for accents).
Akin has an impressive background, having worked in large banks and telecoms in Turkey (where, as he noted, third-party software is rarely purchased), then in Estonia for various banks and insurers before joining Tuum over 18 months ago.
Naturally curious, I asked him for his take: Tuum’s platform vs. homegrown banking code. His response was both validating and eye-opening.
Four Things That Stood Out to Him:
- Minimal Tech Debt:
He was genuinely surprised by how little technical debt exists within Tuum’s platform — especially compared to the tangled systems he’d seen elsewhere. - Deep Product Knowledge:
Our dev and ops teams really know the platform. Akin saw that as a direct result of Tuum’s roots as a software house before evolving into a SaaS provider. - The Fragility of Internal Expertise:
He highlighted a key issue with in-house development: high turnover leads to vanishing institutional knowledge. As people leave, so does the understanding of the system, accelerating tech debt. - Documentation Deficit:
With remote work, tight deadlines, and rising attrition, documentation often gets overlooked — meaning that legacy issues can creep in fast, even in relatively new systems.
Seeing Our Lending Engine in a New Light
I’ve attended several QBRs at Tuum, but hearing Akin’s take gave me a renewed appreciation for our Lending module. It’s an incredibly nimble entry point into any banking stack. New loan products can be launched quickly, integrated seamlessly via APIs, and adapted through low-code/no-code tooling to suit a bank’s specific needs.
It’s cloud-agnostic. Extensible. Built for rapid migration. And best of all — launching with Lending unlocks access to the rest of our suite: Payments, Cards, Core Banking, Orchestration. A logical, low-risk path from legacy to leadership.
Final Thought: The Developer is the New Hero
Akin isn’t in sales. He’s a top-tier engineer. Sometimes, all it takes is listening to the people building the foundations of our industry to reconnect with why we do what we do — and how it really helps our clients.
Years ago, I was told I’d make a better supplier than a banker. They were right. Being on the supplier side gives us a uniquely personal connection with our customers. When we do our job well, they get to deliver exceptional products — and that’s a great feeling.
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