Leumi
Right from the start, we recognised a powerful alignment in how we and Thought Machine analyze problems. Beyond their deep expertise in banking and tech, they offer something unique: a Strategic Client Forum. Being able to openly discuss modernization, dilemmas, and solutions alongside the world's largest banks is a massive benefit—and something no other vendor provides.
Jaime Schcolnik
Challenges
As the largest financial institution in Israel, processing approximately one-third of the nation’s economy, Bank Leumi identified a critical requirement to modernise the core infrastructure supporting its banking franchise. For decades, the bank had pursued a strategy of modernising around its 1970s and 1980s legacy frameworks to avoid risk. However, this approach created a structural bottleneck, severely limiting innovation and agility. To break through this limitation, the bank launched its dedicated technology subsidiary, Finubit, tasked with executing a complete core migration to a cloud-native foundation capable of meeting three strategic goals:
- Transition to real-time: Moving away from traditional, restrictive batch-driven processing to a 24/7 real-time ledger environment to reflect modern customer and transactional demands.
- Operational velocity: Eliminating the long lead times associated with traditional legacy vendor roadmaps, allowing the bank to respond to macroeconomic changes (such as fluctuating interest rates) by launching new financial products in weeks rather than years.
- Infrastructure optimisation: Reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and driving down the bank's already world-class efficiency ratio (which reached 28.6% through technological optimisation) by decommissioning expensive legacy mainframes.
Our Story
The partnership officially began with a licensing agreement signed in 2023. To safely navigate the migration of $152 billion in total credit and $196 billion in total deposits, Finubit and Thought Machine opted for a highly controlled, phased incremental migration strategy.The bank initiated its rollout by tackling its deposit portfolio—a complex system of over 600 highly specialised products that had become a point of friction during shifting interest rate environments. In August 2025, Finubit successfully launched a live pilot with a few hundred customers across several deposit products.Moving with rapid momentum, the bank is opening the platform to its entire retail deposit customer base. From there, the migration expands to business and commercial deposits, with the target to fully migrate all deposit products by Q3 2026. This migration follows a "same to better" philosophy: rather than executing a simple 1:1 data transfer, the technology teams collaborated with business and financial stakeholders to upgrade product features and calculations during the migration process. Concurrently, design work has commenced to migrate retail current accounts, which will be followed by credit and loan portfolios, targeting a comprehensive core transformation within a five-to-six-year window.
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Results
- Unrivaled product flexibility: Code-based smart contracts allow Finubit to model and launch highly sophisticated banking products without limits. The bank can independently configure any of its 600+ complex legacy variations or invent entirely new product structures on the fly. By decoupling product logic from the core platform engine, Bank Leumi can respond immediately to macroeconomic shifts—such as fluctuating interest rates—and deploy competitive deposit or lending products in weeks rather than waiting years for a vendor to modify their roadmap.
- Phased, efficient replatforming: Vault Core’s unique capability to accurately replicate a bank’s complex back book while simultaneously allowing for calculated product improvements enables a highly controlled, low-risk migration. This architecture protects the bank’s massive baseline of retail and business accounts during transition. Rather than a high-risk "Big Bang" approach, the migration is executed incrementally, enabling financial and business stakeholders to upgrade interest calculations and operational features natively as data is shifted.
- Structural efficiency for cost reduction: Transitioning from rigid, legacy architecture to a modern, cloud-native platform eliminates expensive on-premise mainframe maintenance and infrastructure dependencies. Running a lean, modern stack unlocks continuous, 24/7 operations and significantly reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This systematic decommissioning of technological debt provides a direct path to drive Bank Leumi's global top-tier efficiency ratio even lower than its current 28.6%.
- In-house autonomy: Unlike rigid vendor systems that restrict developer access to a limited playground, Thought Machine provides a programmable framework engineered for collaborative innovation. This approach empowers Bank Leumi’s large, highly advanced technology division to leverage its internal engineering talent to full capacity. Finubit retains absolute ownership over its proprietary financial logic, removing vendor dependencies and significantly boosting technical team engagement and knowledge retention.
- Clean, real-time data integrity: Vault Core’s real-time, event-driven ledger architecture replaces slow, traditional batch-processing cycles with a single, immediate source of truth. To bridge the gap with the remaining parts of the legacy bank, Finubit uses specialised adaptation layers that insulate the new core. This clean data structure seamlessly streams real-time financial information directly into downstream data layers, risk engines, and AI applications without disturbing the core ledger's structural integrity.
Right from the start, we recognised a powerful alignment in how we and Thought Machine analyze problems. Beyond their deep expertise in banking and tech, they offer something unique: a Strategic Client Forum. Being able to openly discuss modernization, dilemmas, and solutions alongside the world's largest banks is a massive benefit—and something no other vendor provides.
Jaime Schcolnik
