Thought Machine, the cloud-native core banking and payments technology company, today announced an AI-powered migration solution to accelerate banking modernisation with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) Transform. The solution enables banks to modernise legacy systems faster, safely, and at a fraction of traditional costs.
By combining AWS Transform’s tooling for mainframe reverse engineering with Thought Machine’s Vault Forge, an AI tooling suite, banks can reimagine millions of lines of mainframe code (such as COBOL) into tested financial products in a live sandbox environment, compressing multi-year processes into days. Rather than translating code line-by-line, the joint pipeline extracts pure business intent inside the customer’s secure cloud environment.
Traditional legacy cores hardcode financial products directly into underlying database infrastructure, making migrations slow and risky. In contrast, Thought Machine’s Vault platform defines all financial products entirely as code using Python. Because product logic—such as interest calculations, fee schedules, repayment workflows, and account lifecycles—is completely decoupled from core infrastructure, AI agents can bypass database complexities and directly translate legacy rules into this clean, high-level code.
The solution simplifies modernisation for major national and global financial institutions, enabling incumbent banks to move with the speed and agility needed to compete. It accelerates multi-year programmes, including scanning millions of lines of code and mapping complex data dependencies, with systematic, AI-guided operations. Banks receive fully validated migration proof early in the process. Operating entirely within the bank’s secure AWS environment, the pipeline automates the replication and migration of product logic across four integrated stages:
- Extraction: AWS Transform performs discovery and reverse engineering on legacy applications to extract business logic into structured Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) specifications.
- Consolidation: The pipeline consolidates hundreds of redundant legacy product variations into lean, modern business specifications.
- Synthesis: Vault Forge orchestrates specialised AI agents via Amazon Bedrock to synthesise SDK-compliant Python financial products, test suites, and platform configurations.
- Validation: Human-in-the-Loop review gates give the bank explicit sign-off authority. Once validated, the generated financial products can seamlessly be deployed to a Vault platform sandbox for further evaluation.
To support banks seeking to adopt the solution, Thought Machine is launching a Core Modernisation Accelerator programme. Through this initiative, technical architects, product specialists, and forward-deployed engineers work directly alongside bank teams to ensure seamless delivery, governance, and architecture setup.
Paul Taylor, CEO of Thought Machine, said: "We built Thought Machine on a single, uncompromising mission: to properly and permanently free the world’s banks of legacy technology. Our partnership with AWS marks a massive leap forward in fulfilling that promise. By combining AWS Transform directly with Vault Forge, we are fundamentally rewriting the economics of core modernisation. For the first time, banks can deploy AI to rapidly convert complex legacy mainframe specifications into simulation-tested, cloud-native financial products. This gives large financial institutions the execution speed, audit rigor, and confidence required to eliminate technical debt and complete their cloud transition."
Charith Mendis, Head of Worldwide Banking, Financial Services Industries, Amazon Web Services, said: "Financial institutions are at an inflection point. The cost of maintaining legacy infrastructure continues to rise while customer expectations and regulatory demands are evolving at pace. With Thought Machine’s Vault Forge and AWS Transform’s AI capabilities, we enable banks to safely extract business logic from legacy systems, providing a new continuous, automated path from mainframe code to cloud-native core banking – solving one of the hardest banking modernisation challenges for banks and we believe it will fundamentally change how the industry approaches core transformation."
Want to learn more? Complete the form to request a solution demonstration or book a briefing with our Core Modernisation Accelerator specialists here.
