It's rare for us to feature commercial, off-the-shelf software in the Radar, much less a core banking platform. However, Thought Machine Vault (no connection to Thoughtworks) is an example of a product in this class designed to support good software engineering practices such as test-driven development, continuous delivery and infrastructure as code. Developers define banking products in Vault by writing smart contracts in Python code. This is distinctly different from the standard no-code approach where customization is done through graphical interfaces or proprietary configuration files or both. Because products are defined in regular Python code, developers have access to a range of tools such as test frameworks and version control to ensure that their work is safe and accurate. We wish more financial services platforms were designed with developer effectiveness in mind.
