The newly crowned Spear’s Entrepreneur of the year thinks quickly, acts quickly – and speaks quickly too, as our interview with Paul Taylor in a hidden room that adjoins the Brooklands Bar at the The Peninsula London hotel demonstrates. In a rapid-fire information download, the London-based Ulsterman efficiently explains that the business he’s running today is the third he has founded. After two successful exits, he reckoned he ‘had the energy for one more’.
The second of the trio, Phonetic Arts, made a significant impact. When it was acquired by Google, Taylor joined the tech giant to lead the team of engineers responsible for launching its text-to-speech system in 2012. If you’ve ever heard a Google product speak, you’ve benefited from their work.
But in 2014, after three years at Google, he felt the urge to start from scratch again. This led him to banking and the genesis of the idea behind Thought Machine.
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‘When you’re an entrepreneur and you’re assessing all the things you could do, you have to realise that a company might be five, ten, 15 years of your life,’ Taylor says. ‘So you’ve got to choose your domain and your problem well. When you’re ambitious, you want to pick a big problem. One definition of a big problem is something that nearly everybody uses every day.
A next-gen ‘core banking engine’
‘Most banks run on very old technology,’ explains Taylor, adding that their mainframes might sometimes still have code from the Seventies or Eighties.
Thought Machine’s answer is a next-generation ‘core banking engine’, which serves as a ledger, keeping track of all the deposits in the bank as well as the value of its loans. ‘The exact thing that [clients] do with it varies, but it’s always some combination of radically reducing the cost of running the bank, giving them far more flexibility in the products they offer, and improving user experience for customers.’
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A rapid growth
Lloyd’s, JP Morgan Chase, Standard Chartered and UK fintech Atom Bank are among the 50 or so clients to have come onboard, helping Thought Machine to grow to 550 employees in 18 countries. The firm’s headquarters are in London, where its engineers are based. It doesn’t publicly reveal figures for revenue, but Taylor says it’s ‘around $100 million and growing rapidly’.
Having seen the company valued at $2.7 billion by a funding round in 2022, Taylor is happy to admit that ‘an IPO is definitely on the cards’, although he won’t commit to timing. ‘Thought machine is a very IPO attractive company,’ he says. ‘It has very clear lines of sustainable revenue, its margins are very high, its growth rate is very high. And the problem is not going to go away.’
This feature is published in Spear’s Magazine Issue 94. Click here to subscribe
