Interoperability

The ecosystem of business models, partnerships, and revenue streams enabled by application programming interfaces that allow software systems to communicate and share data. APIs enable companies to monetise their data and functionality, create platform ecosystems, and embed services into third-party applications.

An EU legislative framework (PSD2, Directive 2015/2366) governing payment services and payment service providers across the European Economic Area. PSD2 introduced requirements for strong customer authentication, mandated open access to payment account data for authorised third parties (enabling open banking), and created new categories of regulated payment institutions.

The implied cost of future rework caused by choosing a faster, easier, or less thorough solution during software development instead of a better approach that would take longer. Technical debt accumulates interest in the form of increased maintenance costs, reduced development velocity, and higher defect rates.

The economic phenomenon whereby customers face significant costs, inconvenience, or barriers when attempting to switch from one product, service, or platform to a competitor, effectively binding them to their current provider. Lock-in can arise from contractual obligations, proprietary data formats, integration dependencies, learning curves, or network effects.

A regulatory and technological framework that enables third-party financial service providers to access consumer banking data through secure APIs, with the customer's explicit consent. In the UK, open banking was mandated by the CMA's Open Banking Remedy (2018) and is governed by the Open Banking Implementation Entity.

Artificial intelligence systems designed to provide human-interpretable explanations of their decision-making processes and outputs. Explainability is increasingly required by regulators — particularly in financial services, healthcare, and criminal justice — and is a key differentiator for AI products seeking enterprise adoption in regulated industries.

A computing architecture inspired by biological neural systems, consisting of interconnected layers of nodes that process information through weighted connections. Neural networks form the backbone of deep learning and are used in applications ranging from image recognition to financial modelling.

A legal framework that governs the use, modification, and distribution of open source software, defining the rights and obligations of users and contributors. Key licence types include permissive licences (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD) that allow broad commercial use with minimal restrictions, and copyleft licences (GPL, AGPL) that require derivative works, with their source code, to be released under the same terms when they are distributed (or, under the AGPL, offered to users over a network).

What does it mean to be transparent about technology debt?

Technology debt—quick hacks, legacy code, unscaled infrastructure—should be acknowledged and itemized. Hiding it until post-acquisition acquisition is fraud.

How should companies account for AI infrastructure investments?

AI infrastructure investments — including GPU clusters, MLOps platforms, and data pipelines — are accounted for as either tangible assets (hardware), intangible assets (software platforms), or operating expenses depending on their nature and usefu...