For most of the 2010s, cloud for banking meant putting the customer-facing app in AWS while keeping the actual ledger on a 1990s IBM mainframe in a basement in Canary Wharf. That arrangement is finally, substantively changing.
The drivers are familiar: the economics of cloud at scale, the talent drain from legacy stack maintenance, and growing pressure from regulators who want resilient, auditable, and rapidly updatable systems.
Thought Machine's Vault, Mambu, and 10x Banking have spent the better part of a decade building cloud-native core platforms. The turning point came when Lloyds Banking Group chose Thought Machine for its retail transformation.
The composable architecture these platforms offer also matters enormously. Rather than replacing everything in a single high-risk programme, banks can swap individual modules — savings, payments, lending — independently over time.