Earlier this year, CIBC co-led Thought Machine’s Series E funding round earlier this year with a £30 million investment.
The London-based fintech aims to replace legacy banking infrastructure with a unified, cloud-native core and payments platform.
The company’s flagship offering is Vault Core, which empowers financial institutions to innovate, operate, and scale “entirely free from legacy constraints.”
CIBC recently revealed that it will adopt Thought Machine’s Vault Core platform as the foundation to modernize the firm’s retail banking technology.
“Everyday Banking solutions should make life easier and allow each client to manage their finances in a simple, personalized way,” says Hratch Panossian, Senior Executive Vice-President, Personal and Business Banking, CIBC.
“This technology will enable CIBC to do more than just build modern banking solutions,” Panossian stated. “It reflects our commitment to becoming a leader in technology, radically shifting how we innovate and raising the bar for banking in Canada.”
CIBC is leveraging Vault Core technology through its building and piloting of The Simplii Account.
The pilot serves as an operational proof point for CIBC’s multi-year technology strategy, according to Panossian.
Moving forward, CIBC plans to “progressively modernize its retail core operations,” which includes establishing a framework for advanced capabilities such as real-time payments.
“CIBC is proving that the world’s largest banks can move at speed when equipped with the right technology and ways of working,” commented Paul Taylor, Founder and CEO of Thought Machine.
“Vault Core doesn’t simply modernise the technology behind banking, it gives CIBC the foundation to transform what banking can deliver for Canadians,” he stated, adding: “We are proud to welcome CIBC both as a strategic partner and as an investor as we expand across their retail operations.”
Thought Machine currently powers more than 20 financial institutions.
In September, CIBC joined Project Agorá, a global public-private collaboration convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance to explore how tokenization and programmability could enhance wholesale cross-border payments.
“We are excited to bring CIBC’s payments and digital assets expertise to Project Agorá and work with partners from around the world to help shape the future of cross-border payments,” stated Giorgia Anton, Managing Director and Head, Payments, CIBC Capital Markets, at the time.
“This global initiative is an opportunity to explore practical solutions that could make international transactions faster, more efficient, and more predictable, delivering greater speed, efficiency, and certainty for clients,” Anton remarked.
In a similar move, the bank also recently agreed to co-develop a Canadian dollar based digital money solutions alongside the National Bank of Canada, the Royal Bank of Canada, The Bank of Nova Scotia, BMO, and TD Bank.
The partnership orients around a “tokenized deposits initiative,” which will explore “tokenized deposit solutions to drive responsible innovation and facilitate broad participation in the digital money ecosystem for the benefit of all Canadians,” according to an official statement.
Leave a Reply