Zeta, the banking-technology company built by serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia, has landed new international core-banking modernisation mandates in 2026, extending a platform originally built for Indian card issuers into a genuine attempt to sell modern core banking infrastructure to lenders in the United States and the Gulf. For a company whose earliest customers were mid-sized Indian banks looking to launch co-branded credit cards, the shift toward replacing decades-old mainframe cores at Western financial institutions represents a considerably higher-stakes, higher-reward bet. Founded in 2015, Zeta initially built application programming interfaces and processing infrastructure for card issuance, digital banking and employee benefits programmes, working with Indian lenders including IDFC First Bank on early co-branded card launches. The company later developed Tachyon, a cloud-native core banking platform explicitly designed to replace the COBOL-based mainframe systems that still run the back office of most large global banks, systems that are increasingly expensive to maintain as the engineers who understand them retire. SoftBank's 2021 investment in Zeta, alongside Turakhia's track record building and selling earlier ventures including Directi, gave the company both the capital and the credibility to pursue enterprise sales cycles at a scale most Indian-origin infrastructure companies never attempt. The global core-banking replacement market remains nascent but increasingly contested, with Thought Machine, Mambu and Fiserv's Finxact all competing for the same handful of large financial institutions willing to undertake the multi-year, high-switching-cost project of replacing their core systems. Because a core banking migration touches every downstream system a bank operates, sales cycles routinely run several years from first conversation to signed contract, and reference customers matter enormously in convincing the next prospect that the risk of migration is manageable. Zeta's argument to prospective global customers leans heavily on India-based engineering cost advantages relative to Western competitors, along with the claim that a platform built to handle India's enormous transaction volumes at low cost per transaction is inherently well suited to the scale demands of large international banks. The harder sell is trust: core banking systems sit at the absolute centre of a bank's security and operational risk profile, and persuading a large Western or Gulf institution to hand that function to a relatively young, India-origin vendor requires a depth of due diligence that has historically favoured incumbents with decades of banking-specific track record. What to watch: whether any of Zeta's 2026 international mandates progress from pilot to full production migration, how the company's profitability claims hold up as it invests in the enterprise sales infrastructure needed to compete for large Western bank contracts, and whether a signed reference customer in the US or Gulf becomes a springboard for further international wins.
