Nordic fintech Lunar is modernising its core systems through cloud-native software from UK fintech unicorn Thought Machine.
The software is the result of former Google executives applying their skills and experience to the challenge of core banking modernisation.
Denmark-headquartered Lunar, which also operates in Sweden and Norway, was established in 2015, and offers a bank account via a mobile app. The app provides banking, payments and investment products for consumers and small businesses.
The company, which raised €210m in Series D funding last year, is seeking to introduce new products and services, and to this end sought a new core banking system.
It selected Thought Machine’s cloud-native Vault platform. The fintech will migrate existing functionality, workflows and accounts, and build new products to be managed from a single platform.
Ken Villum Klausen, Lunar founder and CEO, said: “To continue scaling our service across the region, investing in the latest and best technology is a top priority for Lunar.”
He said the company did not want to be limited by the technology it selected. “We searched for a core banking engine that would enable us to deliver on our product roadmap – not dictate it.”
Thought Machine became a unicorn, worth more than $1bn, last year. Lunar joins traditional banking giants Lloyds Banking Group, JPMorgan Chase, SEB, Standard Chartered and BBVA, challengers such as Atom bank, and payments fintechs TransferGo and Curve as customers.
Paul Taylor, founder of Thought Machine, said the Lunar team has a clear, ambitious vision for the future of banking. “They will combine open, modern banking architecture with a sophisticated user experience to create the region’s most comprehensive financial powerhouse,” he said.
Thought Machine employs 500 people, an increase from 270 in March 2021. Just under 400 are in London, with 70 in Singapore. It also has small operations in Australia and the US.
Taylor is heavily influenced by Google following his time at the internet giant. He was an academic at Edinburgh University in the 1990s and focused on search technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
He then moved on to set up two companies. One of them, Phonetic Arts, was acquired by Google in 2010, which became the text-to-speech system behind its driving directions and voice search.
