GFT and Thought Machine announce BankLite to accelerate delivery of cloud-based digital banking

The global IT services and software engineering firm GFT and cloud native core banking company Thought Machine today announce the availability of BankLite. Co-developed by GFT and Thought Machine and running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the new solution enables clients to create and deploy a cloud-based digital bank faster than ever before.

BankLite is a fully modular system designed around Vault, Thought Machine’s next-generation, cloud-native core banking engine, using AWS’s native cloud services, hosted on the AWS infrastructure. This enables banks to create modern, highly flexible end-to-end solutions by delivering the required capabilities to support a multiple-entity, multi-brand, multi-country strategy. Its ‘building block’ architecture of pluggable components works together as one, leveraging an integration layer with microservices utilising the AWS API gateway.

Steve Hoy, Director of Partnerships at Thought Machine, said: “Established financial institutions and start-ups are struggling with the limitations of legacy technology. There is now an urgent need to invest in modern core banking technology enabling superior customer service capabilities, reducing complex technology environments, all the while achieving optimum operational efficiency.

This is where BankLite, incorporating Vault, our cloud-native core banking solution comes into its own. The increasing number of enquiries we are receiving for this type of solution is a clear indication of the industry’s growing appetite for change. We are confident this new offering has a significant part to play in enabling many more financial institutions to rapidly achieve their digital transformation goals.”

Gonzalo Ruiz de Villa, Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer at GFT commented: “BankLite incorporates Digital Bank Launcher, GFT’S new cloud-native asset which has been developed to enable the modern core banking providers to supercharge the capabilities of their solutions.” He went on to explain that DBL comprises all the building blocks necessary to deliver digital channels, as well as the banking platform to support integrations with external service providers and the fintech ecosystem.

According to Ruiz de Villa, DBL provides dynamic scalability and ensures consistent quality and security across the full banking stack, from the core banking system to the digital channels and the integration with third parties. It is built using latest collaborative methods and technologies to ensure that all the teams across the business, from UX and design to DevOps and operations, can operate within a transparent, fully cooperative environment. An API-based experience and a Banking-as-a-Service layer provide a seamless experience across third party services, products, and custom-made software.

Using BankLite’s pre-configured components, architecture and infrastructure which includes GFT’s DBL accelerator, banks can get a ‘lite’ bank up and running in under twelve weeks. This approach will enable users to very quickly deploy different brands across multiple geographies tailored to suit country-specific business and regulatory requirements as well as supporting local products and regional partners.

Vault is a next-generation platform which does not contain any legacy or pre-cloud technology. It has been built from the ground up around APIs using a microservice architecture. The whole system integrates smoothly as the result of a single, coherent design. Through its system of smart contracts, Vault can be configured to run any type of retail bank product, no matter what the complexity. Thought Machine publicly names Lloyds Banking Group, SEB, Standard Chartered and Atom Bank as clients and users of Vault.

Manuel Lavin, Executive Director and Chief Digital Officer at GFT commented: “The launch of BankLite is the culmination of the knowledge and experience we have acquired over many years in helping financial institutions to successfully build custom, end-to-end virtual banks. Using a proven and scalable architecture, we have consistently demonstrated the ability to enable clients to reduce time to market, minimise project risks and control operational and development expenditure. The multi-disciplined BankLite development team has delivered a capability which enables financial firms globally to build a new virtual bank quickly and efficiently from scratch or extend an existing legacy core banking system at a much lower price point. We are looking forward to helping our shared clients reap the benefits of this innovative new offering.”