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 platforms designed to run banks on modern software infrastructure. The company was founded by Paul Taylor, a former Google engineer and Edinburgh AI researcher, and employs more than 550 people across five offices: London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Lisbon.

Its product line comprises two platforms. Vault Core is a core banking platform built from scratch, with no legacy code, using microservices architecture and API-first design to give banks flexibility and control over financial products. Vault Payments is a cloud-native payments processing platform built on the same architectural principles, giving banks control over payment systems. Technical work spans cloud banking technology, core banking systems, cloud-native platform development, microservices, API-first design and payments processing.

The company has raised funding exceeding £500m, with investors including JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, ING, Temasek and Standard Chartered. The Financial Times has named it one of Europe's fastest-growing companies, and it was named a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Retail Core Banking Systems.