GFT and Thought Machine forge strategic partnership to accelerate global banking transformation programmes

Stuttgart, 07 October, 2020 – GFT, a global IT services and software engineering provider driving the digital transformation of the world’s leading companies in financial services, insurance and manufacturing today announces a global strategic partnership with Thought Machine, the cloud native core banking technology firm. This new relationship was forged following a highly collaborative and successful AWS based integration project featuring Vault, Thought Machine’s next-generation core banking platform.

With this recent joint project, GFT has played a pivotal role in building a complete bank on top of the Vault core engine, giving them unique expertise with Thought Machine’s next-generation core banking platform. The project was delivered for a global tier one bank, and is currently in a production environment. Over the coming months and years, the bank plans to onboard millions of customers and deliver innovative products to customers, driving competitive advantage and increasing market share. With the support of GFT, the instance was seamlessly spun up on AWS’ cloud servers, providing enhanced resilience, security and efficiency for this global bank.

Christopher Ortiz, GFT Member of the Group Executive Board and UK Country Manager, said: "The desire to accelerate much needed cloud adoption and change programmes has become self-evident and is where modern solutions, like Vault, really come into their own. Our transformation and software engineering expertise combined with Thought Machine’s core technology will ensure that banks around the world have the necessary tools to help them compete in a cloud native era. This was a true meeting of minds in terms of two very innovative businesses coming together to provide unique but highly complementary skills and experience to successfully deliver a groundbreaking, new client implementation."

Steve Hoy, Director of Partnerships at Thought Machine, said: "Based on cloud native technology, Vault enables unparalleled speed of development and is already allowing banks to launch and innovate at a rapid pace. Our experience of GFT as an integration partner was exceptional, not only were they great people to work with, but their engineering skills, underpinned by an unusually deep understanding of systems implementation and delivery, were second to none."

Vault is a next generation platform which does not contain any legacy or pre-cloud technology. It has been built from the ground up around APIs using a microservices architecture. The whole system integrates smoothly as the result of a single, coherent design and can be easily configured to run any type of retail bank product, regardless of the complexity. Thought Machine publicly names Lloyds Banking Group, SEB, Standard Chartered and SEB as clients and users of Vault.

GFT are transformation software engineering specialists, combining deep understanding and practical hands-on experience of both modern technology and the financial services industry. The firm provides a fast-growing number of financial services organisations across the globe with expertise across key areas such as cloud migration, DevOps, back-end development, mission-critical data infrastructure and system implementation programmes.