Blair W Rundell

Financial institutions have spent decades designing systems around tradeoffs - optimizing for speed, correctness, or resilience depending on the use case. That model is breaking down. As real-time processing, AI-driven workflows, and always-on customer expectations converge, platforms must now deliver all three simultaneously. Yet most architectures still rely on fragmented approaches - databases for correctness, distributed systems for speed, and operational controls for resilience - creating hidden failure modes under stress.

This session explores why these tradeoffs persist, where they break in practice, and how real-time and increasingly autonomous decisioning expose their limits. It introduces a new architectural lens focused on continuous correctness, coordinated state, and resilience under load - helping data and technology leaders rethink how modern financial platforms are designed, operated, and trusted.