Judo Bank

At a glance

Project year 

2024

Bank type 

Challenger bank

Cloud partner 

SaaS with AWS

Geography 

Australia

Challenges

Judo Bank, Australia’s first purpose-built challenger bank for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), faced mounting pressure to modernise its banking infrastructure. Outdated core systems created significant operational friction, most notably, product configuration cycles took up to six months, limiting responsiveness and delaying time to market.
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To support its rapid growth, Judo needed a cloud-native, scalable core banking platform capable of delivering speed, flexibility, and resilience.

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The solution

Judo Bank partnered with Thought Machine to implement Vault Core, replacing its legacy technology with the next-generation core platform. The partnership enabled the bank to cut product development time by 50%––deploying new SME lending products at unprecedented speed––and execute a full-scale migration in just 12 months. With support from partners including Ikigai, Synpulse, and Thoughtworks, Judo Bank has successfully migrated major products—including business and home loans, line of credit and term deposits to Vault Core.

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Our story

As a fast-scaling, SME business bank serving over 4,600 lending and 52,000 deposit customers, Judo Bank recognised that its legacy infrastructure could not keep pace with its ambitions. After an extensive market evaluation, the bank chose Vault Core for its cloud-native architecture, flexibility, and proven scalability.

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The project kicked off in July 2023, and nine months later, Judo launched a pilot product for new customers. This was followed by a successful cutover in July 2024, migrating existing lending customers. In March Judo launched its pilot for Term Deposits, and by April 2025, Judo Bank had completed the migration of its entire lending and deposits business with plans to decommission its legacy core.
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This phased modernisation approach allowed the bank to test and validate Vault Core incrementally, ensuring stability and customer satisfaction throughout.

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Product time-to-market reduced by 50%

‍The bank’s existing systems limited innovation and extended times to deliver new products and features. With Vault Core, Judo Bank built and launched 2 business products including variations, with a full migration within 2 years. Judo can now iterate on these products with new features in a matter of weeks. Powered by Vault Core’s Universal Product Engine and configurable smart contracts, Judo Bank is set to leverage the power of customer data to deliver new products quickly.

4x faster system performance

‍Vault Core reduced transaction processing times from 4–8 seconds to just one second, delivering a faster, smoother experience for Judo. The bank now operates at up to 4x the speed of its previous systems—with zero downtime during migrations or product launches.

Full core migration within 24 months

‍Judo Bank executed a phased migration strategy, completing a full core transformation and migration of its legacy system within 24 months—an exceptional turnaround for a project of this scale. The bank was supported by a dedicated team of specialist client success and engineering experts, ensuring a seamless migration with minimal disruption to both existing and new customers. This end-to-end programme included the successful launch of a pilot and the migration of two core products.

Innovation at scale, without downtime

‍Vault Core’s decoupled architecture separates the Ledger from product development. This enables parallel product innovation without interrupting core banking operations. Judo is positioned to scale rapidly, onboard new customers faster, and respond to market demandsin near real-time.

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