NewTech Friday: Thought Machine – Providing a personalized core banking engine

What led to the creation of Thought Machine?

Prior to Thought Machine, I was an academic and entrepreneur focusing on speech technology. I sold my speech technology to Google and worked there for a few years afterwards. Following my time at Google, I wanted to take the best practices of product design and cloud technology and apply them to another hard problem. I explored creating advanced banking products, combining the power of the cloud with AI to generate powerful retail banking propositions – but found that my efforts were hamstrung by the constraints of the legacy core technology that most, if not all, banks relied upon. These core systems were archaic, often tied to mainframe systems, and left no room for customization. They are the root cause of many of the banks’ problems in being able to offer new, innovative and interesting products to market. So, I decided to tackle this problem directly and develop a new core banking product, designed entirely for cloud infrastructure and customizable by our clients, the banks – allowing for powerful new products to be built and configured freely. This is how we developed our product, Vault Core, which is now being used by major banks around the world.

Could you present Thought Machine's offer?

Vault Core is Thought Machine's cloud-native core banking platform. It is built entirely for cloud infrastructure, in that it is built in microservices, deployed in containers, and designed to be hosted on any cloud infrastructure. It scales elastically, meaning it uses more or less computing resources in the cloud, depending on demand – meaning a lower cost of operation for banks, and no need for banks to use on-premise hardware, which is expensive to maintain and upgrade. It is entirely configurable by our clients – a marked change from the way current core banking systems are designed. They can choose to build any product banking they want, or they can pick from the many hundreds of products we ship with the platform itself.

What's coming next for Thought Machine?

Following our series D funding round, we have raised $160m from Temasek, Morgan Stanley and Intesa Sanpaolo. This takes the total amount of funding to more than $500m, which puts us in a very strong position to expand aggressively, enter new markets and build out our product. We are targeting more Asia Pacific markets – building on the success of Standard Chartered and others – as well as strengthening our North America and Latin America presence. We are still hiring – specifically looking at sales roles in target markets so we can keep up with the incredible demand for our products. Watch this space for further news on Thought Machine’s product development.