Thought Machine

Thought Machine is a cloud banking technology company founded in 2014 and headquartered in London. It builds cloud-native core banking and payments software intended to replace the legacy systems that still underpin much of the banking industry. The company employs more than 550 people across five offices: London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Lisbon.

Its product line rests on Vault, a banking platform written entirely from scratch with no legacy code. Vault Core is a core banking platform built on microservices architecture and API-first design, giving banks control over the design of their financial products. Vault Payments applies the same architecture to payment processing. The company also conducts research in artificial intelligence.

Thought Machine was founded by Paul Taylor, a former Google engineer and AI researcher at Edinburgh. It has raised funding exceeding £500m, with strategic investors including JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, ING, Temasek and Standard Chartered. The Financial Times has listed it among Europe's fastest-growing companies, and it was named a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Retail Core Banking Systems.

Technical work spans cloud-native software, core banking systems, payments processing, microservices and API-first design. The engineering approach is deliberate: the platform contains no inherited code, and the stated mission is to run the world's banks according to the best designs and software practices of the modern age.