Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank by total assets and one of the most profitable and sustainable financial institutions in Europe, has selected Thought Machine, the UK-based company for… Core Banking Technology.
In connection with this partnership, Intesa Sanpaolo has made a £40m investment in Thought Machine to become part of the company’s growth story.
Intesa Sanpaolo will power its new Isybank digital banking platform, recently unveiled as part of its 2022-2025 business plan, using Vault, Thought Machine’s core banking engine. Initially, Isybank will serve Intesa Sanpaolo’s four million retail customers in Italy with a wide range of digital banking services, thereby contributing to structural cost reduction for the group.
As part of the extensive investments in digital transformation, Intesa Sanpaolo plans to extend Thought Machine’s core banking platform to the entire infrastructure of the group to replace the mainframe-based core technology and move to a cloud infrastructure.
A key reason for selecting Vault was the solution’s flexibility in serving clients using multi-currency, multi-country banking services. The bank intends to extend Thought Machine’s functionalities to other customer segments beyond normal retail banking, both in Italy and internationally.
Carlo Messina, CEO at Intesa Sanpaolo, comments: “With our new business plan, we are taking on the challenge of fintechs. We have decided to create a new, fully digital bank to meet the needs of our younger private clients, who forego branch care and who do not require the same personal service as our multi-channel clients in the Exclusive, Affluent and Private segments . This new digital bank will transform our retail banking business from an established company into a mass-market fintech challenger, with the option to expand internationally. We chose Thought Machine because the company is known internationally as a fintech innovator. We firmly believe that Thought Machine is the right partner for this transformation,
Paul Taylor, Founder and CEO of Thought Machine, states : “In addition to our partnerships with leading banks around the world, we are now proud that Italy’s largest bank and one of Europe’s leading financial institutions has chosen Thought Machine’s technology for its new digital banking platform will use.
With the involvement of Intesa Sanpaolo as an investor in the company, we have forged a partnership that will see our technology deployed across more areas of their portfolio and play a key role in delivering enhanced digital services and experiences to the company’s extensive customer base bank in Italy and abroad.”
Intesa Sanpaolo serves around 13.5 million clients in Italy through digital and traditional channels and 7.1 million clients abroad, where the company has commercial banking subsidiaries in 12 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Egypt, as well as an international network specialized in corporate clients is represented in 25 countries.
For large banks undergoing fundamental transformation, Thought Machine has proven to be the best option. No other provider of core banking solutions has convinced so many customers in this sector. Thought Machine’s clients include JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group and Standard Chartered, among others. With a valuation of more than $1 billion, the company has raised around $340 million. It is headquartered in London with regional offices in New York, Singapore and Sydney.
