BAAS firm Thought Machine plans to double staff in 2020

April 03, 2020

Cloud-native FinTech provider to create 300 new jobs following $83m funding round.

London FinTech firm Thought Machine has announced that its rapid expansion will continue with a doubled workforce by the end of 2020.

The cloud-native technology firm provides the underpinning financial technology infrastructure which allows both incumbent and challenger banks to expand their digital offering more quickly.

Among its clients are Lloyds Bank and challenger bank Atom. CEO Paul Taylor founded the firm alongside ex-Google colleague William Montgomery in 2014, as challenger banks began to emerge.

“Thought Machine currently has a headcount of 300 staff. Headcount grew 300% in 2019, up from 80 staff in 2018, and the business plans to double in size in 2020,” he tells BusinessCloud.

The plans follow its $83m Series B funding round at the beginning of March led by Draper Esprit, which Taylor said would power its expansion into North America and Asia Pacific.

Last year firm opened its second office in Singapore to cover sales and marketing.

“We are exceeding projections and our own targets for both revenue, gross margin and ARR,” he says.

The entrepreneur previously founded Rhetorical Systems, which was acquired by Nuance in 2004 and Phonetic Arts, which was acquired by Google in 2010 and where he met co-founder Montgomery.

Last year Thought Machine was voted one of BusinessCloud’s 100 FinTech Disrupters and last month it was announced as one of the latest inductees to Tech Nation’s Future Fifty programme.

Taylor recently claimed in a blog post that banks moving to the cloud could save more than 90% of their costs – something incumbent banks would find more difficult than newer players in the market.

“Cloud-native banking has become accepted as the most common desired target architecture for the world’s banks,” he says.

“The biggest challenge for the established banks now is that they need to deploy these modern systems quickly before the challengers continue to reach millions of their customers.”

Thought Machine’s core banking platform Vault was its first product to market, and Taylor says the platform could allow banks to launch new products in days rather than months.

Article originally published here.