Thought Machine

Founded by former Google engineer Paul Taylor, Thought Machine is a British company offering cloud-native, API-based banking infrastructure platform “Vault” for incumbent banks to replace legacy tech and for digital and challenger banks to develop banking services. Users can leverage Vault to connect to existing systems within a bank (such as payments and credit decisioning) or develop retail banking services such as current and savings accounts, loans, mortgages, and credit cards, among others. The company also offers the “Vault Payments” for cloud-native card and payment processing.

Vault also lets users design workflows and use smart contracts, while offering data analytics and reporting. Notably, the platform can be hosted through several cloud service platforms including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and IBM Cloud.

Vault offers its infrastructure for existing banks through three main forms: 1) digital greenfield banks (to build an entirely new, scalable digital bank), 2) new products to existing banks (to embed new banking products without creating entirely new banking infrastructure), 3) replatforming banks (to migrate existing banks to Vault from legacy IT systems).

Thought Machine has a global presence with its workforce of over 500 people (as of November 2021) based across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne.

Key customers and partnerships

In July 2024, Thought Machine partnered with Hong Kong-based Quantifeed, a digital wealth management platform, to offer an integrated solution for private banks across the globe. In October 2023, Thought Machine partnered with Form3 , a British cloud-based payment processing, clearing, and settlement infrastructure provider, to expand its end-to-end payment processing for banks and financial institutions in the US and Europe. In February 2022, Thought Machine partnered with Intesa Sanpaolo (Italy’s largest bank by total assets) to power “Isybank,” a new digital banking platform. Along with this partnership, Thought Machine also received an investment of GBP 40 million (USD 54 million) from Intesa Sanpaolo.

Its customers include several large, global banks such as Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, and SEB Group. Vault was also picked by Arvest Bank (incumbent bank in operation for over 60 years), in September 2021, to modernize Arvest’s core banking platform to deliver personalized, real-time banking services to its clients.