Lloyds Banking Group (Lloyds) has announced a strategic partnership with Thought Machine to accelerate the digital transformation of the bank’s business.
Thought Machine is a UK-based growth stage technology company whose core product, Vault, is a cloud-native next generation banking platform. Over the past three years, the Thought Machine team has written Vault using the latest software engineering techniques to help simplify the technical and operational complexity of banking, whilst maintaining the advantages of security and reliability.
The announced partnership is in line with Lloyds’ Strategic Review, published last year, and is consistent with its ongoing drive to enhance the customer experience, become more agile, and build on its market-leading efficiency.
The primary nature of the partnership is tech-based, with the Group recently completing extensive testing and proofs of concept, with Thought Machine. The technology will be able to provide customers with more tailored products, as well as enable faster development cycles and further digital banking improvements. Lloyds estimates their deployment phase to be during 2019.
Lloyds has additionally made an £11 million investment into the fintech, representing a 10 per cent stake, as part of its ‘Series A’ £18 million investment round. Lloyds will continue to look at further investment opportunities to help accelerate the delivery of the ambitious transformation programme.
Zak Mian, Group Director, Transformation, Lloyds Banking Group, reported: “A key part of our recently launched three-year strategic plan is applying technology innovation to meet our customers’ evolving needs. I’m really excited to work with the Thought Machine team to explore ways to simplify and enhance our IT architecture and helping on our journey to make banking easy and simple for customers.”
Paul Taylor, CEO and Founder of Thought Machine, said: “We are delighted to announce this partnership with Lloyds. Lloyds has shown a deep commitment to embrace the opportunities that new technologies can bring in improving customers’ banking experience and it is a pleasure to take this partnership forward.”
About Thought Machine
Thought Machine is a UK-based growth stage technology company which builds cloud native technology for banks. Founded in 2014 by CEO Paul Taylor, Thought Machine’s mission is to enable banks to deploy modern systems and move away from the legacy platforms that plague the banking industry.
About Vault
All data runs in real time within the system, meaning data analytics and regulatory reporting can be fully automated. The Vault APIs create the ability to have fully automated customer interaction via mobile and web applications.
