AWS and Thought Machine Launch AI-Powered Core Banking Migration

AI-driven modernisation that compresses multi-year legacy banking migrations into days.

Legacy core banking systems remain one of the heaviest anchors on financial institutions. Decades-old COBOL mainframes hardcode products directly into databases, making modernisation slow, costly, and risky. Banks face rising maintenance costs, mounting technical debt, and growing pressure from regulators and customers to deliver cloud-native services. The new partnership between Thought Machine and Amazon Web Services (AWS) directly addresses this challenge with an AI-powered migration pipeline.

What was announced

On 29 September 2026, Thought Machine announced an AI-powered migration solution built with AWS Transform. By combining AWS Transform mainframe reverse engineering agents with Thought Machine Vault Forge, banks can reimagine millions of lines of mainframe code such as COBOL into tested financial products inside a live sandbox environment. The joint pipeline extracts business intent inside the customer secure AWS environment, rather than translating code line-by-line.

To support adoption, Thought Machine is launching a joint Core Modernisation Accelerator programme, in which technical architects, product specialists, and forward-deployed engineers work alongside bank engineering teams on delivery, governance, and architecture setup.

Why this matters

For CIOs, CTOs, and heads of transformation at financial institutions, core modernisation has historically meant multi-year programmes with significant execution risk. The AWS and Thought Machine solution shifts the economics: AI agents bypass database complexities and translate legacy product logic directly into clean, high-level Python code on the Vault platform. Validated migration proof is delivered early, giving engineering and risk teams confidence to proceed. Procurement and compliance leaders also benefit from a fully auditable pipeline that runs entirely inside the bank secure AWS environment.

Our partnership with AWS marks a massive leap forward. By combining AWS Transform directly with Vault Forge, we are fundamentally rewriting the economics of core modernisation.

Technical details

• Extraction: AWS Transform performs discovery and reverse engineering on legacy applications to extract business logic into structured EARS specifications.
• Consolidation: Hundreds of redundant legacy product variations are consolidated into lean, modern business specifications.
• Synthesis: Vault Forge orchestrates specialised AI agents via Amazon Bedrock to synthesise SDK-compliant Python financial products, test suites, and platform configurations.
• Validation: Human-in-the-Loop review gates give bank engineering and risk teams explicit sign-off authority before deployment to a Vault sandbox.
• Deployment model: The entire pipeline runs inside the bank secure AWS environment, preserving data sovereignty and audit trails.

Softprom and Amazon Web Services

Softprom is the official partner of Amazon Web Services. Our team helps banks, fintechs, and enterprises evaluate, procure, and deploy AWS cloud services with full technical and licensing support.

This content was prepared as part of the Softprom DistriFlow project — an automated system for monitoring and adapting vendor news. Original source: original article.