Banking and payments technology group FIS has acquired OpenCoreOS, the AI-native core banking startup founded by former Zafin chief executive Al Karim Somji, only months after the company was publicly launched.
FIS told The Fintech Times the deal completed in March and that Somji has since joined the company as president of enterprise platforms. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The deal was not announced at the time, although Companies House records put the change of control on 18 March, when Fidelity National Information Services was registered as owning at least 75 per cent of OpenCoreOS UK’s shares and voting rights, as well as having the right to appoint or remove directors. Somji ceased to be a person with significant control on the same day. The board also changed, with all four existing directors stepping down and two new directors appointed.
Bigger core banking providers are increasingly buying newer technology rather than building it themselves, according to analysts, who expect more deals to follow.
Paul Schaus, founder and managing partner of banking consultancy CCG Catalyst, says: “It tells me the large providers have decided it is faster and cheaper to buy innovation than to build it.”
He cites Fiserv’s acquisition of Finxact, FIS’s purchase of Bond and SoFi’s acquisition of Technisys as earlier examples of established financial technology companies buying newer platforms.
On OpenCoreOS, Schaus says: “When a company that is young gets acquired, the buyer is not buying a business, because there was no business yet. FIS bought the technology direction, the team, and time.”
A fast move into FIS
OpenCoreOS was introduced in October 2025 as the “next chapter” in Somji’s work on banking technology, after a period in stealth. The company described OpenCoreOS as an AI-native core modernisation platform and said general availability was planned for the first quarter of 2026.
Somji had already stepped down as chief executive of Zafin after more than two decades leading the banking technology company, while staying on its board. He founded OpenCoreOS with former HSBC global CIO Steve Van Wyk, CTO Slavo Vojacek and chief AI and product officer Ricky Marcon.
At launch, the company said it was working with tier-one design partners. It also said the platform could run across several cloud providers at once, so an outage at one would not take a bank offline.
FIS already runs several core banking systems. It launched Modern Banking Platform in early 2020 as a cloud-native, component-based way for banks to upgrade their core in stages. Buying OpenCoreOS adds another newer-generation platform to that mix.
Schaus notes the timing: “Six years after launching it, FIS went out and bought an AI-native core.”
FIS gave no further detail on why the deal was not announced, whether OpenCoreOS remains a standalone product, how FIS is using the technology or whether any banks were live on the platform when the deal completed. It did confirm Somji’s move into the president of enterprise platforms role, and Schaus thinks that appointment says plenty about the deal.
“I see this as talent and architecture more than technology,” he said. “Al Karim Somji spent 22 years at Zafin helping large banks modernise around their legacy cores, he understands the installed base better than almost anyone who has sold against it, and he arrived with a design team and a multi-cloud, AI-native blueprint.
“You do not make the founder of a months-old startup President of Enterprise Platforms because you wanted his code. FIS bought a blueprint and the person who drew it.”
Why buy rather than build?
Daniel Mayo, principal analyst at Celent, a research and advisory firm focused on technology for financial institutions, suggests the technology “would be the main play” for FIS, alongside bringing in people who understand modern platforms.
Mayo says FIS has long run several core systems, including some older second- and third-generation platforms. Newer cores are cloud native, with AI-first systems starting to come through.
As core architecture keeps moving on, it puts pressure on providers to keep pace if they want to keep winning new customers, he added. Those that fall behind can end up relying on maintenance revenue from their existing customer base rather than new licence sales, which he describes as “not a great place to be”.
Reworking an established platform is also no small job. “It is actually not just about porting the technology to a new language. It is about rearchitecting them, as that’s a very expensive process,” Mayo says, adding that for some providers, buying can make more sense than rebuilding.
OpenCoreOS’s founders had been making a similar case before the acquisition. Speaking on a podcast published in January, Vojacek said replacing parts of the technology stack behind a live system serving millions of accounts was “incredibly difficult”.
Marcon said adapting an established platform for AI posed the same problem. “It’s really difficult to rethink your whole platform from the ground up,” he said, adding that for many existing technology providers it was “probably not feasible” without building “a direct competitor to themselves”.
What OpenCoreOS was building
OpenCoreOS used “AI-native” to distinguish its approach from adding AI features to an existing core. In the January podcast, Marcon said OpenCoreOS had built the platform around AI from the outset, including how banks could configure products. Rather than requiring teams to work through forms or write code, OpenCoreOS was building a natural-language interface through which users could describe the financial behaviour they wanted a product to have.
Marcon also described OpenCoreOS as an alternative to a “big bang” core replacement. In a LinkedIn comment, he wrote that “OpenCoreOS is designed for co-existence”, allowing banks to modernise existing products or launch new ones while their legacy core continued running.
The company was also keeping the core focused on the basics, mainly the transactional and ledgering engine, while functions such as customer master data and product and pricing engines could sit elsewhere.
Mayo says the harder problem for a young core provider is winning those first major customers. “They may have great technology,” he says, “but business credibility is the main challenge.” Being part of FIS could give OpenCoreOS the financial backing, credibility and market reach that a new provider can struggle to establish on its own.
He also sees a potential cultural problem when a next-generation technology team joins a much larger company. The two can have very different priorities and ways of working, and while those combinations can work, “sometimes they can not work quite spectacularly”.
More consolidation ahead
Mayo still sees room for independent challengers, particularly those built around a SaaS model with one underlying platform rather than heavily customised versions for individual banks. But banks do not replace their core systems very often, leaving providers to compete for a relatively limited number of new deals.
“There was a huge fintech investment wave in new entrants from around 2017 to 2022,” Mayo says. “I suspect not all of those are going to survive, and there will probably be further consolidation.”
As consolidation continues, Schaus says banks can benefit from newer technology gaining the backing and distribution of a large provider, but each acquisition also removes an independent option from the market.
“Every absorbed challenger is an alternative that no longer exists when a bank sits down to modernise,” he says. “Consolidation delivers new technology at the incumbent’s pace and price, and the question every bank should ask is what happened to the alternative it never got to consider.”
US regulators have also raised concerns about concentration in the market. In a joint statement on 11 September, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC said a significant share of the core-provider market is controlled by a few large providers, limiting community banks’ negotiating power. They also said contract terms that make it harder for community banks to switch providers or use alternative services would factor into supervisory decisions.
What happens to OpenCoreOS
Attention now turns to how FIS uses OpenCoreOS. “The test of this deal is whether the blueprint survives a large company’s roadmap process,” Schaus says. “History says the talent leaves within three years and the architecture gets absorbed as features. Somji’s title suggests FIS intends to beat that history, and I hope they do, because banks need what he was building.”
OpenCoreOS’s website remains live and continues to present the platform under its own name. Vojacek and Marcon still list themselves as being at OpenCoreOS on LinkedIn, while Steve Van Wyk still lists himself as chairman of the board. A new director of operations also joined OpenCoreOS in July, according to LinkedIn.
OpenCoreOS had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
AI level 0 of 5: researched, written and edited by Claire Woffenden without generative AI; only everyday tools such as spelling and grammar checkers were used. What the levels mean
