Antony Jenkins ran one of the world’s biggest banks. He knows how to solve those legacy tech nightmares (and launched a start-up to prove it)

Antony Jenkins spent 30 years inside banking, including a run as Barclays chief executive from 2012 to 2015, and he came away with a blunt lesson: the tech underneath big institutions is a mess. Not a flashy mess. A layered, inherited, years-upon-years-of-patching mess. He calls it “spaghetti systems,” and the phrase fits because these platforms were often built on top of code from the 70s and 80s, with some pieces dating back to the 60s.

That matters because banks have spent decades bolting on internet and mobile services without really rebuilding the core. Jenkins says those changes were delivered, but slowly and expensively. In his view, that is exactly how incumbents get left behind: they keep adding gargoyles to the cathedral instead of starting over.

So he did start over. About a decade ago, he launched 10x Banking on a blank piece of paper at his dining room table. The company sells a banking platform that reorganizes core services and customer interfaces in ways legacy systems struggle to match. Its clients include Chase U.K., Old Mutual and Westpac. A £50m raise in 2024 valued the company at more than £500m, or $663m.

Jenkins’ pitch is simple. Most bank systems still mix batch processing with semi-real-time operations. 10x runs in real time, which means clients can see what is happening at any moment and, if they want, layer AI agents on top to produce better customer outcomes. He says big-bank product launches can take anywhere from nine months to a year and a half. He wants that closer to minutes. Not because speed is cool. Because the old way is too slow to matter.