This week Dave and Dharm sit down with Slavo Vojacek and Ricky Marcon, co-founders of OpenCoreOS, for a frank conversation about what “core banking” needs to become in an AI-native world.

Slavo (a distributed-systems engineer turned core-banking specialist) and Ricky (a product and business-builder with deep delivery experience) argue that the industry is at a new inflexion point: real-time payments, growing transaction volumes, and cloud fragility are exposing the limits of both legacy platforms and the so-called next-generation cores.

They unpack why OpenCoreOS is deliberately opinionated about what a “core” should be. For them, it is primarily the ledgering and transactional engine (interest, postings, and reconciliation at scale), while other components, like customer master data and product tooling, increasingly sit outside the core.

The discussion then moves into the hard engineering: what it means to build a platform designed to run across multiple clouds, aiming for zero downtime and zero data loss, and why retrofitting that kind of resilience into an existing architecture is far harder than it sounds.

Finally, the episode connects the dots to “agentic banking” and why AI cannot simply be “sprinkled on top” of yesterday’s platforms. OpenCore OS is designed so that product and operational configuration can be expressed in natural language, abstracting complexity while staying deterministic where it matters. Dharmesh also shares why he joined the company’s board, and why this approach feels fundamentally different from bolt-on AI features.

If you care about the future of banking infrastructure, resilience, and what AI-native actually means (beyond the marketing), this one is for you.