Book
Banking & Capital Markets Systems
What Indian banks and financial institutions actually run — core banking, payments, lending, treasury, custody, the registrar duopoly and regulatory reporting — and, just as usefully, which of it can be verified at all.
Written from regulator and exchange publications, bank annual reports and dated vendor announcements — not from the job-posting corpus, which contains no banks. Each chapter states which claims are sourced and which are not.
CHAPTER 1
How a bank's stack actually decomposes
Seven layers, and why 'core banking' means three different things depending on who is saying it.
CHAPTER 2
Core banking, and which Indian bank actually runs what
The verified map, two corrections to claims everyone repeats, and the reason most of the work is on systems several versions behind.
CHAPTER 3
Payments, and the liability nobody sees
NPCI rails versus RBI rails, why a switch is not the NFS, where the aggregator boundary sits, and who actually carries the blame when UPI fails.
CHAPTER 4
Lending — origination, the bureaus, and what the 2025 directions changed
LOS versus LMS versus data aggregation, why lenders pull more than one bureau, and the rule that redrew every fintech lending partnership.
CHAPTER 5
Treasury, FX, and the single counterparty underneath all of it
Why CCIL has no analogue in most engineers' mental model of markets, and why the vendor question matters less than you would think.
CHAPTER 6
Trading, and the exchange as gatekeeper of your algorithm
Why SEBI's approval regime surprises engineers from other markets, and what actually connects to NSE and BSE.
CHAPTER 7
Custody, depositories, and the settlement fact everyone gets wrong
CDSL and NSDL do not split the market the way people assume, and India has not moved to T+0.
CHAPTER 8
Fund management and the registrar duopoly
CAMS and KFin — a structurally Indian category that international guides miss entirely.
CHAPTER 9
Risk, AML, and why regulatory reporting is a lineage problem
OFSAA, the detection layer, and the RBI mandate that is really about data extraction.
CHAPTER 10
The digital rupee, and what its own numbers say
India's central bank digital currency is a live pilot with published figures — which makes it a rare chance to see adoption without the marketing.
CHAPTER 11
Tokenisation, and the one thread that did not collapse
Atomic settlement is a real mechanical advantage with a precise definition — and it is already moving trillions, mostly abroad.
CHAPTER 12
The consortium graveyard, and the three ways it failed
Four of five trade-finance consortiums are dead — including one that proved the technology worked. The failure modes are not technical, and they generalise.
CHAPTER 13
What you can and cannot find out, and what to ask instead
Roughly half the vendor-to-institution map is unsourceable. That is a fact about the field, and it is usable.