Mastercard and Thought Machine Partner to Deliver Core Banking Capabilities

Mastercard and Thought Machine have expanded their partnership to deliver payments and core banking capabilities to financial institutions worldwide.

This collaboration brings together Mastercard’s global network and digital solutions and Thought Machine’s cloud-native core banking and payments platform, the companies said in a Monday (June 17) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

Together, the companies aim to help financial institutions shift from legacy core banking and payment technologies to cloud-native ones, according to the release.

With these cloud-native technologies, they plan to enhance banking efficiency, lower costs, enable rapid introduction of more customer-centric experiences and allow banks to offer more innovative pay-now solutions, per the release.

“We are excited to simplify and enhance the modernization experience for complex banks worldwide and make it even easier for them to deliver sophisticated customer experiences,” Paul Taylor, CEO and founder of Thought Machine, said in the release.

This expanded partnership builds upon an earlier one in which Mastercard and Thought Machine collaborated on an issuer processing solution called Vault Payments in 2022, according to the release.

In addition, Thought Machine participated in Mastercard’s startup engagement program, Start Path, in 2020.

“We’ve had a longstanding relationship with Thought Machine, and they’re now our first strategic, end-to-end partner in the core banking space,” Mark Barnett, president, Mastercard Europe, said in the release. “We’re providing leading banks and financial institutions with a comprehensive core banking and card issuing solution that meets tomorrow’s payment needs, and we look forward to scaling our joint capabilities.”

Thought Machine was founded by Taylor, a former Google engineer, in 2014 to power online financial services on behalf of legacy financial institutions and neobanks.

In October, the company partnered with cloud-native account-to-account (A2A) platform Form3 to offer financial institutions an end-to-end solution for real-time payment processing. By integrating Thought Machine’s Vault Payments with Form3’s A2A platform, the companies enable clients to employ Thought Machine’s configuration capabilities with Form3’s direct connection to payment schemes.

In August, Thought Machine teamed up with Virtusa to launch a platform that helps financial institutions onboard small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This collaboration brings together Virtusa’s expertise in digital transformation and Thought Machine’s core banking platform.