What happened: The banking-as-a-service unit of Scandinavian bank SEB has announced that it has selected Thought Machine as its core banking provider. (Thought Machine). The press release highlights that SEB Embedded, the name of SEB’s banking-as-a-service unit, leverages Thought Machine’s Vault Core product, which enables them to launch their first customer, the retailer Hemköp, in just ten months (covered in a previous EF Review edition).
My comment: First of all, this was kind of a re-announcement of a previous press release from 2019 (Thought Machine). Back in 2019, SEB laid the foundation for SEB Embedded when its innovation studio SEBx explored the future of banking and started to integrate Thought Machine. The re-announcement a few years later makes sense for both parties because we know exactly what SEB Embedded is and have seen the first live customer.
Similar to banking-as-a-service, there is a variety of core banking providers with very different flavours and approaches (fun fact: when I google ‘core banking provider’, I see four sponsored adds before organic results). From my experience, I don’t think there is one core banking provider that has a tailored offering for banking-as-a-service providers and, therefore, is the logical choice for such providers. The partnership between SEB and Thought Machine seems to be going well, but it will be interesting to see with whom other new entrants will partner.
