CLOUD Comfortable in the Cloud: Native technology allows banks more freedom to innovate
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BIG Legacy banks have warmed to the idea of Cloud technology, but now they must go ‘native’, says Gareth Richardson, COO of Thought Machine The announcement by Lloyds Banking Group in the middle of 2020 that it would work with Form3 on developing a Cloud-native payment-as-a-service platform was somewhat overshadowed by everything else occurring that year. And yet it was a significant, strategic leap for a legacy bank to signal its intention to re-architect the infrastructure for a mission-critical operation like payments. Form3 is a payments processing partner to Cloud-native core banking provider Thought Machine, which had already begun work on migrating the first wave of
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 8
customer accounts from a Lloyds division to the company’s core banking engine, Vault. It’s designed to deliver a range of banking services, including checking accounts, savings accounts, loans, credit cards and mortgages. Being API-by-default, other functions can easily be layered on top, and banks can also use Vault to build their own custom products. Founded in 2014 by ex-Google staffers, Thought Machine follows the GAFA approach to technology building: flexibility is baked into a system that’s characterised by the use of Cloud-based microservices. It provides a secure and flexible architecture
on which to hang a modern bank – not an excuse to lift and shift existing operations from a mainframe, which only succeeds in creating new silos on a remote private, public or hybrid system. Vault is constantly upgrading, always improving – another hallmark of the Big Tech approach – and it demands a different, more collaborative mindset within the bank when it comes to technology development. “The vision of a Cloud-native world is where everything is running with microservices and is horizontally scalable across multiple regions, giving all the resiliency that we need. And that really www.fintechf.com
