My two cents from the perspective of smaller financial institutions - cores do not care about making it easier for you to move off of them. They probably wouldn

My two cents from the perspective of smaller financial institutions - cores do not care about making it easier for you to move off of them. They probably wouldn’t mind making it easier to move on, but core conversions are such a nightmare that they have dedicated onboarding teams for this with lots of tooling and knowledge, and since everyone else’s data structures are different, there’s no point standardizing your own. Additionally, there are, like, three big players in the space (at our level, at least). When you’re choosing a core, you’re probably going to be more concerned by questions such as “what percentage of our total revenue will go to this one application” and “what features can we use to save us tons of work and money” and “will this make us more money”. You probably won’t be too concerned with whether converting off the core fifteen years down the line is super difficult or “just” pretty difficult. If you do ask, all three will give you the same answer anyways.