Until the latter half of 2024, core banking applications (CBAs) attracted little public attention outside Nigeria’s banking industry. That changed when several major commercial banks switched or upgraded their CBAs, disrupting banking services for millions of customers. But five years before core banking was on Nigerians’ lips, the founding team at Kuda, a Nigerian neobank which boasts over seven million customers, knew that building its CBA could be the difference between success and failure. “It was, of course, one of the hardest and probably the most daring decisions I’ve ever taken in my professional life,” Musty Mustapha, Kuda’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said about the decision to build an in-house CBA. “I knew I had to stick my neck on the line with my founding partn...