Trend 2: The Platform Is Dead; Long Live the Platform
There are lots of opinions out there—including from even Microsoft—that the platform market is dead.
What do we mean when we refer to “platforms”? We’re talking about industry-neutral applications that span support for sales, marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), customer or IT service. According to a Futurum report published in June 2025, this market is going to expand at a nearly 11% CAGR for the period between 2024 and 2029 to nearly $US 570 billion. This growth is across all verticals, and within banking and insurance, the research firm predicted that the market would grow from just over $US 39 billion in 2024 to $US 80 billion in 2029. The platform vendors we’re talking about include Microsoft with a third of the overall market; Salesforce with 16%; Oracle with 9% ,and of course others like SAP and ServiceNow. (Full disclosure, the writer serves on the advisory board of Plutus Technology Solutions, Inc, a ServiceNow Ventures investment.)
With investments like these —and the typical enterprise dependencies, financial services firms simply have to continue to leverage these “sunk costs”, regardless of their future software/technology decision-making. So, the prediction of the death of platforms is premature, maybe even grossly misleading. However, there will be change.
Some platform providers are capitalizing on these past investments and reliance on the vendor by introducing industry-specific – vertical - features, enhanced by AI as well as capabilities from partner APIs. It’ll be the partnerships that the platform companies strike that drive revenues. The platform providers are luring business away from core providers like FIS, Fiserv, Mambu, and SBS Software in banking and Guidewire and Accenture in insurance. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others have targeted their embedded bases with such capabilities for some time, and in the case of Salesforce, for more than a decade.
Our last Angry Rabbit Group article addressed the state of fintechs, FSIs, especially those in the mid-tier, which don’t have the risk appetite, tech chops, and applications budgets for the scale of core system investments with unproven relationships. Their business technology decision-makers gravitate to known and safe, with proven vendor relationships, but have to cope with innovation glut and plan for hyper-flexibility, nevertheless.
With the relentless and reckless hype on all things AI--especially agentic and now AGI—the economy, the customer value chain, sunk tech costs and debt, reliance, falling risk appetites—will keep platforms at the forefront. But platform vendors can’t be complacent. They have to strengthen their openness, flexibility, and innovation. So, as far as this under-hyped trend goes, platforms are far from dying; instead, platforms will be increasing their banking and insurance core capabilities, both native and through partners, in the coming year.
We see two implications: first, while platform providers are extending platform capabilities for banking and insurance, their first targets will be outside of core, and will follow with core as a second target. Second, banking and insurance business architectures will reflect the reality of hybrid environments, including multiple platforms, making alliances between core and platform providers more essential—and more contentious.
In our upcoming articles about underhyped tech trends, the Angry Rabbit Group will talk about banking and insurance core platforms and regulation. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us @ GetInTouch@AngryRabbitGroup.com.