The financial services sector is undergoing significant transformation due to evolving regulations, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased competition from digital-native startups and technology companies. As a Solutions Architect working with various engineering teams, notably in European banks, the author observes key trends that are expected to shape the industry by 2025. These include a continued shift towards agile methodologies, with banks moving away from traditional hierarchical project management towards more iterative, sprint-based approaches. There is also a push towards adopting microservices and event-driven architectures to replace legacy systems, though challenges such as managing complexity and ensuring transactional integrity persist. Platform teams are becoming crucial in handling the increased complexity of modern engineering environments, while artificial intelligence and machine learning are expanding their footprint in areas like fraud detection and customer support. Additionally, there is a growing interest in workflow-driven microservices to address challenges in scaling and reliability. To stay competitive, financial institutions must modernize their services by leveraging these trends, with tools like Temporal offering solutions to mitigate risks associated with distributed systems.