Ex-Barclays CEO Jenkins Built 10x to Kill Banking's Legacy Tech

A £50 million funding round in 2024 valued Antony Jenkins's banking platform company 10x at more than £500 million ($663 million), capping a decade-long effort to fix the technology failures he says he witnessed firsthand running one of the world's largest banks.

Jenkins spent 30 years in banking and led Barclays as CEO from 2012 until his departure in 2015, four years after the financial crisis. When he took the top job, he promised to put "the customer at the heart of everything we do" — the boilerplate of choice for incoming chief executives. He argues the gap between saying and doing is where large banks fail, and the culprit is usually technology.

"Much of it had been created in the 70s and 80s," Jenkins said of the computer systems underpinning banking at the time. "Some of it even went back to the 60s."

He calls the problem "spaghetti systems": computer refits and technological upgrades built haphazardly over time, one layered on top of another.

"It's a bit like a cathedral. When you look at a cathedral, it's all beautifully built. But actually, it's generations of people who have added a gargoyle here or a spire there and that's exactly how these systems started off in the banking industry," Jenkins said.

The consequences are measurable in product cycles. "In a big bank, if you want to deliver a new product, a new variant mortgage or a credit card, it can take you nine months to a year to 18 months to build and deliver that," Jenkins said. "I wanted to be able to do that in a few minutes."

Jenkins founded 10x roughly a decade ago, starting, as he describes it, with a blank piece of paper on his dining room table. The company provides a banking platform that organizes core services and customer interfaces in ways legacy systems find almost impossible. Its clients include Chase U.K., Old Mutual and Westpac.

The founding thesis was formed during his years inside legacy banking. "I was worried that as technology made lots of things possible, we as incumbents would fall further and further behind," Jenkins said. "You could see that manifest itself as banks responded firstly to having to deliver services over the internet and then over mobile — which they did, but they did it in a very expensive, slow, and costly way. And I lived through all of those experiences in my first career in the banking industry."

The urgency has only grown with artificial intelligence. Jenkins says most bank systems still run a hybrid of batch and semi-real-time processing, which limits what AI can do. "Our platform runs in real time, and our clients can look at what's going on at any point in time. And then [see] if they want to apply AI agents to create a set of outcomes that are better for the customer," he said.

The company's name encodes its ambition. "Technology allows you to do lots of things, but it's only really worth doing if you are going to make things a lot better. Hence the name, 10x. We wanted to make things 10 times better, not just a little better," Jenkins said.

He is not alone in concluding that genuine technological disruption requires a clean start. Greg Jackson, founder of Octopus Energy Group, has said true disruption is often only possible by finding a greenfield site and starting again.

The broader context matters for executives at long-established businesses. Many C-suite leaders know they should restart whole technology systems, an imperative sharpened as AI agents demand new approaches to technology enablement. But they also operate in risk-averse environments where caution suppresses innovation — and where patching the cathedral remains the default. Jenkins's bet, now valued at over £500 million, is that the greenfield path wins.