Since 2022, Thought Machine has run a Client Advisory Board with its Tier 1 banks. Taking place three times a year, this forum brings together the CTOs and senior engineering leadership from some of the world’s largest banks. The forum comprises a day-long deep-dive session into our product and offers the opportunity for a well-defined discussion where the banks share feedback and ideas to support our product development and also share best practices among themselves.
We wanted to share here why we host such a forum and why it is so valuable for us and the banks who join. Hopefully, others in the industry will find it useful.
- The insights and feedback we receive in this forum ensure our company and product strategy continue to meet the needs of Tier 1 and 2 banks. While this doesn’t replace our regular engagement with each bank, the focused discussion between the banks makes this feedback particularly valuable. In our most recent forum, we deep-dived into how we can reduce banks’ time to production and what was striking as the banks discussed together was the similarity in many of the challenges they faced.
- This forum lets us deepen our understanding of our clients’ specific needs and how they plan to use Vault Core and Vault Payments. Again, this is hugely helpful for us to continue building and growing innovative products and features for banks. We are now able to present new product developments that have been informed by the learnings we have taken from past CAB forums.
- The banks also share best-practice knowledge to support each other as they look to build a new cloud-native stack and modernise their bank. This is increasingly an important part of the CAB. For example, a Tier 1 bank has recently joined the forum, and even though they are at the beginning of their journey, they have taken learnings from other banks that they can use to accelerate their own plans. In another case, we had a bank change their product launch strategy after listening to other members’ lessons learnt.
The last benefit I shared is the most important for us and the members of the forum. Most senior technology leaders will only ever undertake a full bank modernisation initiative once in their career. Therefore, having a community of other leaders with whom they can share their experiences and learn from is key to supporting them in this process. For us, it directly supports the achievement of our mission: to rid the world’s banks of legacy technology. Together with our clients, through the Client Advisory Board, and in many other ways, we are accelerating the modernisation journey of banks so they can achieve all the benefits of a cloud-native stack earlier: the ability to launch innovative products quickly, real-time personalisation, always-on technology that is highly resilient. A modern next-generation technology stack is better for the banks and, most importantly, delivers benefits to the people who rely on their banks daily for their financial needs.
Just to finish off, we wanted to take the opportunity to thank the banks who have hosted the forum with us since it was launched:
- Lloyds Banking Group
- Trust Bank, Standard Chartered
- Intesa Sanpaolo
- JPMorgan Chase
- SEB
Plus, all the banks who have attended - the discussion and opportunity to deep-dive with you is invaluable.
