In most industries, a legacy is something you build toward and can be proud of. In banking and payments, it’s something your CTO is trying to escape. But the institutions that built modern payments and finance argue they’re best placed to reinvent it. They point to the rails, the regulatory relationships, the balance sheets, and the customer trust that no challenger can replicate overnight. A new generation of players says au contraire. Legacy is just a polite word for stuck. That the cost structures, the core systems, and the cultural muscle memory of incumbents make true reinvention impossible from the inside.