10x Banking raises £40m as legacy core banking replacement accelerates

10x Banking, the London-based cloud-native core banking platform founded by former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins, has secured £40 million in new funding from pan-European B2B software investor AshGrove Capital. The raise arrives as the company reports its strongest operational year to date, pointing to a structural shift in how established financial institutions are managing the pressure to modernise infrastructure built for a pre-digital era.

Over the past twelve months, 10x Banking became EBITDA-positive, surpassed 10 million live accounts, added more than ten new financial institution clients, and grew annual recurring revenue by over 30%. Its existing client roster includes Westpac and Chase UK, lending weight to the platform's claim to enterprise-grade scalability. AshGrove, which manages approximately €1 billion of capital across its strategies, joins a cap table that already includes BlackRock and J.P. Morgan.

The infrastructure problem driving demand

The commercial momentum at 10x Banking reflects a problem that has been building for decades inside the world's largest banks. Core banking systems at many established institutions were designed for batch processing, not real-time data flows, and they were never architected to surface the kind of granular, API-accessible data that powers modern product development or AI-assisted decision-making. Replacing them is expensive, operationally risky, and politically complex inside large organisations, which is precisely why the market has been slow to move.

Antony Jenkins, Founder, Chair and CEO, argued that appetite is now translating into action: "Financial institutions have a clear ambition to innovate, but many remain constrained by infrastructure that was not built for real-time, digital banking. Our platform is now proving its value at significant scale."

Phil Fretwell, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of AshGrove Capital, described the structural opportunity: "We believe the company is well positioned to benefit from powerful industry tailwinds as banks continue replacing legacy systems with more flexible, real-time and AI-ready infrastructure."

Convergence lens: why this is more than a fintech raise

The investment sits at the convergence of financial infrastructure modernisation and the broader enterprise AI build-out, and the timing is not incidental. Banks seeking to deploy AI at the customer and risk-management layers are increasingly discovering that their legacy cores are the binding constraint. A real-time, API-first core does not merely improve product speed; it determines whether an institution can meaningfully participate in AI-enabled banking at all. The data architecture question and the AI readiness question are, in practice, the same question.

That framing reorients how investors and strategists should read the core banking replacement cycle. It is no longer purely a fintech infrastructure story. It is an AI-enablement story expressed through financial services, with capital allocation implications that stretch into enterprise software, data infrastructure, and the competitive positioning of incumbent banks relative to digital challengers.

The broader market for core banking modernisation is contested. Mambu, Thought Machine, and Temenos are all pursuing overlapping segments of the same replacement wave, with varying emphasis on cloud architecture, geography, and bank size. The fact that a B2B software-focused investor like AshGrove, rather than a strategic or sector-specialist fund, is deploying growth capital into 10x Banking signals that the platform's recurring revenue profile and cost discipline have become legible to generalist growth investors, not just fintech specialists.

For cross-sector capital allocators, the read-across is worth noting. The same dynamic playing out in banking infrastructure, where AI-readiness is forcing a reckoning with legacy systems, is visible in insurance, healthcare administration, and public-sector data platforms. The £40 million round at 10x Banking is, in that sense, an early data point in what is likely to be a multi-year, multi-sector capital rotation into real-time, AI-compatible infrastructure at the enterprise layer.

The proceeds will fund sales and go-to-market expansion, suggesting 10x's near-term priority is capturing a larger share of a replacement cycle that is, by most signals, only beginning.