Thought Machine is a financial technology company building cloud-native technology to revolutionize core banking. The company offers technology that runs any type of banking product, from mortgages to current accounts and has a workflow engine that defines how the bank operates.
Founded in 2014 and based in London, Thought Machine is one of the UK’s leading fintech companies and is undergoing a period of rapid expansion. Their mission is to cure one of the banking industry’s primary problems: its reliance on outdated IT infrastructure.
Nearly every bank is stuck on a legacy IT platform. This cripples their ability to innovate and give their customers the type of service they deserve. Their solution to this is Vault: a complete retail banking platform capable of easy configuration to suit the needs of any bank.
Thought Machine has built Vault from the ground up as a cloud-native, microservice API architecture platform. The company has a deep culture of engineering excellence and believes that this is what delivers a solution compelling enough to engender a seismic shift in the banking industry.
Vault Core
Vault Core is a cloud-native core banking platform, built from scratch to run in the cloud. It is cloud-agnostic and gives banks total flexibility to choose the hosting option and provider that best meets their needs.
Using Vault Core, banks can run any product they wish, allowing them to control and shape their strategy as they see fit. It can replicate a bank’s existing back book of products and create entirely new ones, including current and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and mortgages.
Banks have launched products from Thought Machine’s Product Library, a catalogue of more than 200 preconfigured financial products. They have also built products themselves such as buy-now-pay-later offerings, a combined debit and credit card, offset mortgages, and much more.
Vault Core comes with a full array of financial products already built. These include market-standard products such as transaction accounts, savings, loans, mortgages, and credit cards. The platform supports Islamic banking and innovative products such as buy-now-pay-later, wallets, offset mortgages, and more.
Vault Core ships with a suite of base smart contracts as part of its extensive Product Library offering. These smart contracts are ready for launch and can easily be tailored to the bank’s specific needs. The Product Library currently supports more than 30 countries, and new products are continuously added.
Features of the Vault platform
Configurability
Vault Core and Vault Payments allow banks to build the technology stack they want and give them complete control. The platform comes with an API-first architecture. This gives banks the power to connect to services and technologies from other vendors.
All product creation takes place in Vault Core’s configuration layer using its smart contracts system. A rich library of pre-integrated solutions and pre-configured smart contracts enables banks to go live quickly.
Cloud-native
Thought Machine developed Vault Core and Vault Payments from scratch; without a single line of legacy or pre-cloud code. The products run natively in the cloud – taking advantage of its unique features, including horizontal scaling, continuous deployment, high availability, and self-healing capabilities.
Operational resilience
Banks can run any product, payment scheme, or type on a single platform with Vault Core and Vault Payments. Its clients control the entire process. They can build, test, and launch any product they can imagine – without constraints or dependencies.
Banks can deploy the Vault platform on any cloud infrastructure provider. Thought Machine’s clients decide how and where they want to host their instances of Vault Core and Vault Payments. Both are also available as SaaS.
Microservices architecture
The Vault platform’s microservices architecture is built from the ground up to take full advantage of cloud-native computing. This enables banks to have an elastic, highly available, and flexible core banking system, which scales depending on load.
Top 5 Thought Machine Alternatives
Finflux
Finflux is a SaaS-based lending platform that offers all-in-one solutions for needs of loan origination, loan management, and financial accounting. It also offers marketplace integration, app-based lending, alternative data-based credit scoring, dashboards & reporting, and analytics.
At present, Finflux serves about 4+ million borrowers with an active loan portfolio of $3.2 billion.
FinFlux is a fast-growing lending platform that offers classic and bespoke solutions. They can serve myriad institutions ranging from those who serve the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) to nuanced (non)-banking/financial institutions. This also includes Microfinance, SACCOs, Banks, FIs, evolving Fintechs, Business Correspondents, Aggregators in the origination process, Agent networks, and many more.
Finflux breaks the transactional input model into an outcomes-based model to achieve competitive advantage. Digitization, authoring underwriting rules, rules-based automation in workflows, tiered maker-checkers, and approvals offer makes a difference in the customer experience and digital journey.
The platform comes with many must-have integrations and marketplace nexus to improve the time to market. It is purely a SaaS-based model, aimed truly at impeccable architecture. It is fine-tuned for performance benefits (API round trip times < 2 seconds), banking grade security & compliance, and scale on demand.
nCino Bank Operating System
In today’s banking environment, bankers are expected to do more with less, manage regulation, ensure data security, digitally engage with customers, and deliver increased profit to shareholders.
Designed by bankers who understand both the challenges and opportunities in the marketplace, nCino is the worldwide leader in cloud banking. The platform delivers the speed and convenience that customers expect, backed by the quality and transparency that bankers need.
With its Bank Operating System, built on the Salesforce platform, financial institutions can leverage the power and security of the Salesforce platform to revolutionize the way they operate. nCino’s Bank Operating System combines customer relationship management, business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence and reporting. This complete banking solution transforms the way financial institutions interact with customers and employees, automating processes across all business channels and organizational levels.
nCino also integrates with a bank’s core system to provide a modern experience for employees while replacing disparate point solutions and manual-based processes, serving as the single source of truth for the financial institution.
As a secure cloud-based solution, the nCino Bank Operating System empowers bank employees and leaders with true insight into the bank through an end-to-end solution combining customer relationship management (CRM), loan origination, workflow, enterprise content management, and instant reporting capabilities.
Alkami Platform
Alkami Technology, Inc. is a cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions that helps clients digitally transform through retail and business banking. It provides digital account opening and loan origination, multi-payment fraud prevention, and data analytics and engagement solutions.
The Alkami Platform provides financial institutions with a complete digital banking solution to securely onboard, engage, and grow retail and business users for banks and credit unions. Clients can tailor their user experience with additional Alkami products and integrations to third-party solutions via API, SSO and SDK functionality. The online banking platform is delivered with an administrative console that provides our clients with the ability to manage their digital banking users’ experiences.
Alkami invests heavily in the eight product categories within this journey to enable clients to achieve digital success:
- Account Opening and Loan Origination
- Security & Fraud Protection
- Money Movement
- Financial Wellness
- Customer Service
- Card Experience
- Marketing & Analytics
- Extensibility
Alkami Platform fosters a fintech partner ecosystem that grants freedom, extensibility, and further brand differentiation. It also gives the ability for carefully selected fintechs to integrate with APIs and build directly onto our platform with Alkami’s SDK. It offers API and single sign-on (SSO) integrations, which can be built in-house by Alkami or by our partners.
Alkami’s clients may choose to deploy their own integrations using the same tools that the developers use. They can also take advantage of a network of certified Alkami SDK developers or partner system integrators. The Alkami Platform comes with an administrative console that provides financial institution clients with the ability to manage their digital banking users’ experiences.
The administrative console is divided into five primary functions: Setup, Operations, Content, Support, and Data.
BankPoint
BankPoint is an intuitive cloud-based system that aims to dramatically improve and simplify the way commercial banks and non-bank lenders operate. It seamlessly integrates with back-end systems, including core banking systems and document imaging systems, to provide a single point of entry for the entire staff.
The system provides workflow and automation for the entire life of a loan, from loan origination and document collection to portfolio management, covenant tracking, loan review, approval workflow, and more.
Based in McKinney, TX, BankPoint has been operating in the banking and lending space since 2002. The company started as a consulting firm helping banks evaluate, select, and implement critical systems such as core banking systems, imaging systems, digital banking systems, commercial loan systems, and related FinTech. In 2006, the platform partnered with multiple banks to create a system that fills the identified gaps in existing banking and commercial lending systems.
Since that time, it has been implemented in dozens of commercial banks and non-bank lenders to help automate and streamline their daily operations.
BankPoint system’s design aims at intuitiveness and user-friendliness for all areas of commercial lending and banking, including:
- Lenders
- Credit Admins
- Loan Ops
- Relationship Managers
- Portfolio Managers
- Executives
- Admins
- Special Assets Managers
- REO Managers
- Treasury Management Users, and more.
Finacle
Finacle is an industry-leading universal banking solution from EdgeVerve Systems. The solution helps financial institutions develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation and accelerate growth in the digital world.
Over the past 25 years, Finacle has been helping financial institutions develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation and accelerate growth in the digital world. Today, it is the choice of banks across 94 countries and serves over 848 million customers. This is approximately 16.5% of the world’s adult banked population.
Finacle solutions address the core banking, e-banking, mobile banking, CRM, payments, treasury, origination, liquidity management, Islamic banking, wealth management, and analytics needs of financial institutions worldwide. Assessment of the top 1000 world banks reveals that banks powered by Finacle enjoy 50% higher returns on assets, 30% higher returns on capital, and 8.1% points lesser costs to income than others.
Features include:
- A comprehensive, integrated yet modular agile business solution
- Addresses all the core needs of the bank, in easy-to-configure modules
- Multi-entity capabilities to support multiple legal entities, across various geographies, currencies, and time zones on a single application instance
- Easy to configure modules and components
Recommended Articles
- Varicent Review: Overview, Features And Alternatives 2023
- RAVE MOBILE SAFETY: Overview, Features, Alternatives & More
- Staffbase Reviews 2023: Features, Pricing and Competitors
- MICROSOFT HYPER-V: What Is It & How Do You Use It?
- Zoho Workdrive Reviews: Features, Pricing And More 2023
- TOP 10 VERIZON COMPETITORS & ALTERNATIVES IN 2023
References
- Financial IT
- Thought Machine Official Website
- G2
