Don’t bank on a Google Bank, bank on banks becoming Google-like, as signaled by a fintech that’s bringing the Google engine room to banks. After three years working at Google in what he described as being “in the kitchen of a master chef” for a software engineer, former Google tech lead Paul Taylor is now serving up the fruits of his learnings to the banking sector.
Taylor is co-founder and CEO at Thought Machine. The fintech company has developed a cloud-based banking platform that could create the closest thing to a “Google Bank” possible, save Google itself having a mid-life crisis and becoming a bank.
Lloyds Banking Group plans to move 500,000 Intelligent Finance division customer accounts from its legacy IT onto the fintech’s cloud-based platform, known as Vault.
And digital-only UK challenger bank Atom is another customer looking to migrate to Vault. Atom is 40% owned by Spanish bank BBVA, which has an option to buy the rest of the shares. If the implementation is a success at Atom, BBVA, which has over 50 million customers, could consider it an option for its other businesses stuck on legacy systems.