THOUGHT MACHINE: CLOUD BANKING Incremental elevation: Approach migration in stages, says Taylor
step at a
Thought Machine Founder and CEO Paul Taylor believes Cloud-hosted banking infrastructure is irresistible. But how, if you’re an incumbent, do you achieve it? The answer is ‘carefully’ It’s been estimated that more than one in five adults have opened an account with a challenger bank in the UK, the majority looking for a higher degree of personalisation, reasonable and transparent fees, and superior customer service. Not much to ask, you might think. And certainly challengers, almost exclusively
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born in the Cloud, don’t have to worry about how their infrastructure will cope with delivering it: it just does. Legacy banks, on the other hand, have a tendency to ‘spend more of their time worrying about infrastructure than they do about banking’, according to Paul Taylor, CEO and founder of Thought Machine, whose software-as-a-service core banking platform, Vault, is designed to give them the head space to focus on the customer. Cloud-native Vault is becoming a go-to for new-to-market as well as Tier 1 banks. Notable among the latter is UK banking group Lloyds, which bought a 10 per cent stake in the company in 2018 during a Series A funding round and came back to support a Series B raise, led by Draper Esprit with an extension led by Eurazeo Growth that closed at $125million in July.
Lloyds has adopted Thought Machine’s ‘incremental approach’ to migrating its 30 million customers to Cloud-based services. Banking giant Standard Chartered, on the other hand, chose Vault to power its new standalone digital bank Mox in Hong Kong, while UK challenger Atom Bank uses it as its core. The fintech recently sealed a deal with pan-European banking service Monese, too, and ‘all your cards in one’ fintech Curve has selected Vault for its new Curve Credit offering. The Lloyds and Standard Chartered tie-ups are indicative of a rapid growth in partnerships between incumbent banks and infrastructure technology companies such as Thought Machine, revealed by a recent Banking Circle survey. It showed that 80 per cent of retail banks and 74 per cent of commercial banks in www.fintech.finance
