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GNNs: Modernizing fraud prevention in financial services
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The financial services industry is changing. Capital is moving toward digital assets, stablecoins and 24/7 decentralized networks that offer speed and utility beyond the reach of traditional systems. For banks, this shift is a direct challenge to deposit bases and existing revenue models.
However, this transition also presents an opportunity to recapture value. By developing digital asset capabilities, specifically stablecoin payments, tokenized deposits and secure custody, banks can prevent deposit flight, attract new wealth and resolve the liquidity constraints inherent in traditional banking hours.
This article explains how the Vault platform (Vault Core and Vault Payments), implemented with Thoughtworks’ engineering expertise, allows banks to deploy these capabilities alongside their current technology stack, as part of an evolution toward centralizing operations and seamless interoperability between traditional infrastructure and new digital payment rails.
1. The opportunity: The bank as a secure gateway and liquidity hub
While the broader crypto market is often associated with volatile trading, the most immediate and compliant application for regulated banks is foundational: trust, custody and liquidity. The strategic value lies in being the primary orchestrator of a client's wealth and money movement — bridging the traditional and digital worlds by making their underlying payment rails fully interoperable.
Institutional custody and the unified wealth view
Customers want the security of a regulated bank but the utility of digital assets. By integrating with sub-custodians, banks allow clients to hold and view digital assets alongside traditional accounts. The bank provides the security layer; the customer assumes the asset risk.
24/7 liquidity and offline money movement
For highly regulated banks, the most powerful unlock lies in money movement. Tokenized deposits and stablecoins allow for instant settlement even when traditional clearing networks are offline.
By launching these foundational services, banks can tap into distinct, high-growth personas:
The corporate treasurer: Businesses are increasingly seeking 24/7 liquidity management and cross-border settlement that traditional banking hours and correspondent networks cannot accommodate. Products built on stablecoins and tokenized fiat solve this immediately.
The diversified high-net-worth individual (HNWI): Seeks a unified view of both fiat and digital holdings to manage their total net worth in one place.
The crypto-native millennial/gen Z: This demographic often bypasses traditional banks for their primary financial activities. Offering "banking-grade security" for their digital portfolios brings them back into the fold.
2. Why legacy systems cannot keep up
Legacy banking systems were built for a world of "end-of-day" batches and standard fiat currencies. Even when banks act purely as custodians or stablecoin orchestrators, legacy systems struggle fundamentally with the tokenized economy for, among others, the following three reasons:
Incompatible asset models: Legacy ledgers cannot natively represent complex, fractionalized digital assets or tokenized deposits without messy workarounds or heavy, rigid customization.
Batch vs. real-time: Blockchains operate 24/7, 365 days a year. A legacy core that updates balances only during nightly batches cannot accurately reflect on-chain positions or process offline stablecoin settlements that happen on a Sunday afternoon.
Orchestration gaps: Acting as a secure gateway requires sophisticated API orchestration to connect with digital asset custodians, manage multistep signing workflows and trigger real-time compliance checks. Legacy systems lack this native orchestration logic.
3. The Vault platform
To bridge this gap, banks do not need to rip and replace their existing core immediately. Instead, they can deploy the Vault platform as a high-performance sidecar to enable digital asset capabilities.
The solution relies on two synchronized engines working in concert with a specialized partner ecosystem:
A. Vault Payments: The orchestrator
Vault Payments acts as the intelligent gateway between the bank’s channels and the external digital asset ecosystem. It is designed to act as the secure banking layer that orchestrates a best-of-breed ecosystem, integrating seamlessly with custodians (for key management and settlement) and compliance providers for know your customer (KYC) screening.
Crucially, it also orchestrates related fiat money movements to bridge traditional and digital liquidity. For example, Vault Payments can trigger a USD Fedwire payment to top up a USDC wallet, ensuring funds are available for weekend settlement. It also gives the bank dynamic control by calling external systems to calculate live fees and spreads in real time.
When a customer initiates a request (e.g., "Transfer 100,000 USDC"), Vault Payments triggers a workflow that validates banking limits, translates the request for the wallet API and monitors for the transaction confirmation. Once Vault Payments receives the transaction confirmation from the custodian, it immediately pushes a real-time update to Vault Core. This triggers the banking product logic, ensuring the customer's app reflects the true status instantly, without waiting for end-of-day batches.
Vault Payments also aids the bank’s operations teams with a native “Investigation and Repair” UI. This interface allows teams to visualize transaction lifecycles, monitor status in real time and manually repair or retry instructions if needed. This capability ensures that banks can maintain high service availability and resolve exceptions efficiently without requiring constant engineering intervention.
B. Vault Core: The event-driven product engine
Vault Core acts as the system of record for the customer’s position. Its real-time, event-driven architecture is what enables the bank to manage 24/7 liquidity effortlessly.
Commercial logic via smart contracts: Crucially, these are Vault smart contracts (banking product logic written in Python) running directly on Vault Core. While Vault Payments provides dynamic orchestration by calling external systems for real-time data, Vault Core provides the same level of granular control over the core banking product. This allows the bank to:
Enforce velocity limits: Programmatically restrict the volume of tokenized transfers based on compliance tiers, even outside of normal banking hours.
Enable programmable loyalty: Create loyalty tokens that can be spent or traded instantly within a partner ecosystem, integrated directly into the core banking logic.
Automate ledger rules: instantly trigger ledger updates or account status changes based on the successful settlement and fees calculated during the orchestration phase.
The workflow in action: To visualize how these components coordinate in a live scenario, consider the lifecycle of an after-hours stablecoin settlement:
Customer action: A corporate treasurer initiates a cross-border stablecoin transfer on a Saturday.
Orchestration and pricing: Vault Payments receives the request, calls out in real time to get the information required for dynamic fee calculations, validates account limits and translates the instruction for the wallet API.
On-chain execution: The wallet infrastructure executes the token transfer on the blockchain.
Synchronization: The Wallet API notifies Vault Payments of success.
Ledger update: Vault Payments posts the finalized transaction and the dynamically calculated fee to Vault Core.
Product logic: The Vault smart contract (on Vault Core) instantly updates the customer’s dashboard to reflect the settled balances and recorded fees.
4. Integration architecture
The traditional bottleneck
Traditionally, launching a new asset class is a multiyear ordeal. Legacy cores require extensive custom coding to support non-fiat assets, often forcing banks to purchase specialized "crypto ledgers" or fragmented subsystems. This creates a complex architecture where data is siloed, reconciliation is manual and launching a new capability takes 12 to 18 months.
The sidecar model
The Vault platform changes this equation. By running as a cloud-native sidecar, it allows banks to launch digital asset propositions in weeks rather than years, leaving the legacy core untouched.
The strategic value of this model lies in the unification of tokenized asset capabilities and traditional financial infrastructure. While many market solutions offer siloed "crypto-only" ledgers, Vault enables banks to leverage their current deposit base while providing customers with a consolidated view of their entire portfolio.
This architecture serves as a strategic bridge. While the sidecar model allows for immediate market entry, the Vault platform’s universality enables banks to eventually migrate legacy workloads and evolve toward a centralized, unified technology stack. This pathway eliminates the long-term risk of maintaining fragmented systems and ensures a seamless transition to a fully digital infrastructure.
Operating on independent, auto-scaling infrastructure, the sidecar ensures 24/7 liquidity and real-time updates — completely unconstrained by the legacy core’s nightly batch processing or weekend maintenance windows.
5. Risk management and compliance
In the sidecar model, security is programmable, but technology is only part of the requirement. A successful digital asset launch requires both robust system controls and a unified operating model.
Platform-level controls (real-time reconciliation): To mitigate settlement risk, the Vault platform provides an automated reconciliation framework. Vault Core tracks the intended account state, while Vault Payments verifies the actual on-chain state reported by the custodian.
Ecosystem-level controls (governance and integration): Beyond the core ledger, banks must establish comprehensive playbooks for interacting with the blockchain. This includes selecting institutional-grade custody partners, defining secure key-management policies and mapping out responses to on-chain events (such as network forks or slashing).
Bringing these pieces together is a complex engineering challenge. Drawing on deep engineering expertise, Thoughtworks partners with banks to design and implement these critical operational frameworks, ensuring the entire technology stack strictly adheres to institutional risk and compliance standards.
6. The strategic advantage: Why a unified platform matters
The strategic value of the Vault platform lies in its universality. Implementing a digital asset strategy should not mean creating a permanent technological island. Unlike niche ledger solutions, the Vault platform is a full-featured, cloud-native core banking and payments engine.
A foundation, not a patch: The platform is bidirectional. A bank starting with a digital asset sidecar is building on a fully capable core that can eventually run fiat savings, loans, or credit cards. Conversely, a bank already using Vault for fiat deposits can seamlessly offer digital asset products tomorrow.
Unified customer view: As the line between "traditional finance" and "tokenized finance" blurs, Vault Core natively handles both asset classes on the same platform. This enables the bank to provide a holistic view of the customer’s wealth,future-proofing the bank for a world where every asset may eventually be tokenized.
Rapid differentiation: Unlike rigid legacy systems where product changes take months, Vault's programmable architecture allows banks to design and launch unique hybrid products — like multicurrency baskets spanning fiat and digital assets — in weeks. This agility allows the bank to differentiate its offering and capture market share faster than competitors relying on off-the-shelf crypto modules.
7. Conclusion
The tokenized economy is a present reality. Banks that fail to offer safe, 24/7 liquidity and digital asset custody risk losing their most valuable deposits to fintech competitors. While the Vault platform provides the agile core and payment orchestration, Thoughtworks brings the engineering expertise to deliver it safely. By leveraging this joint approach, financial institutions can launch institutional-grade digital asset products today that are secure, robust and scalable for the future.
