General Bank of Canada (GBC), a Schedule 1 chartered western Canadian bank, is partnering with Thought Machine, the next-generation banking technology company. This collaboration is a cornerstone of GBC's vision, marking a fundamental shift to a modern, cloud-native technology architecture.
GBC is moving its new core banking product development to Vault Core, Thought Machine's cloud-native platform. By focusing development in Vault Core, GBC gains the modern, flexible infrastructure necessary to support its ambitious transformation strategy and accelerate innovation across the bank.
Vault Core is a first-of-a-kind, universal core banking platform, built completely from scratch without a single line of legacy code. Its real-time architecture and powerful, flexible product engine allow banks to build, launch, and service any financial product from scratch. By deploying Vault Core, GBC will achieve new levels of configurability, efficiency, and agility that were simply unattainable in its previous environment.
By gradually adopting Vault Core, GBC aims to become a leading financial product manufacturer. This capability will enable GBC to operate as a high-value Bank-to-Business-to-Consumer (“B2B2C”) provider, leveraging its bank charter to manufacture innovative products and distribute them through a wide range of distribution channels and partners.
Paul Taylor, CEO and founder of Thought Machine, comments: "General Bank of Canada's ambition demands an elegant, reliable, and scalable core banking platform. Vault Core is engineered to provide exactly that: a real-time, universal product engine that will empower GBC to innovate rapidly and manufacture its products to the Canadian fintech community, all while maintaining absolute platform reliability for its end-users. We are proud to provide the architectural foundation for a bank with such an ambitious and technology-forward vision for Canada."
Barry Hensch, CTO of General Bank of Canada, comments: “GBC is building upon its exceptionally strong foundation to help drive the long-term future of Canadian finance. Thought Machine’s Vault Core is a core catalyst, providing the ultimate, legacy-free foundation we need to continue to grow in an industry that is being massively disrupted. This technological transformation will position us as a powerful market driver, capable of leveraging a real-time product engine to configure and ship next-generation financial services at speed. This confirms GBC's status as the Schedule 1 bank actively enabling market change, using our new speed and agility to fuel product innovation and drive strong competition throughout the Canadian financial sector as a B2B2C player.”
Thought Machine's team of cloud experts focuses on creating high-performance, scalable technology that serves global banks such as Lloyds, Standard Chartered, and Intesa Sanpaolo, as well as established challengers like Zopa Bank, Shawbrook, and Trust Bank.