Banks are competing on plumbing now: cores, embedded payments, and fraud as capital

A virtual bank, built on a new core

CLICX, a digital banking enterprise formed through a partnership between Bank, Advanced Info Service and PTT Oil and Retail Business, has selected Thought Machine as the technology foundation for its new bank, and is the first of Thailand's new virtual banks to achieve operational readiness in line with the Bank of Thailand's regulatory timetable. The choice of core is the story: by decoupling product logic from underlying core infrastructure, CLICX can build, launch and reconfigure products, or adjust interest rate models in-house, eliminating core-vendor dependencies and legacy release cycles. m:…5052

The commercial target is customers the traditional system underserves. CLICX uses real-time behavioral data to refine credit risk modelling for nano-loans and digital personal loans, enabling risk-based pricing, personalised interest rates and tailored terms. That is a core banking decision disguised as a product decision: a bank that can reprice from live behaviour can serve smaller loans profitably, while a bank locked into legacy release cycles cannot change its offer fast enough to try. m:…5052

Thought Machine's own numbers, reported by the company, frame the momentum: it recently surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, driven by a 57 per cent year-on-year growth rate, and now counts over 20 global tier 1 banks as clients. The Thailand win adds to a regional portfolio that already includes deployments in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines. A core vendor crossing $100 million in recurring revenue is a procurement option tier 1 banks are already exercising. m:…5052

Embedded finance at 2,000 counters

PNC's work with U-Haul shows the same plumbing logic from the incumbent side. U-Haul operates roughly 2,000 locations and wanted to improve its check receipt process, standardizing check deposits across them. PNC worked with U-Haul's payments team to integrate its APIs for check verification and deposit into U-Haul's existing technology, eliminating the need for separate hardware, and the two firms formed a collaborative project team that met regularly through implementation. m:…6474

The APIs do more than move paper faster. Using PNC's ePayments API, U-Haul customers can receive funds in real time through Zelle and other alternatives to cover unanticipated roadside assistance costs, and through PNC's Payments API the company can remit electronic payments to MovingHelp service providers quickly. The Account Verification Services API verifies that the name on a check matches the account, reducing potential check fraud. Together, the embedded offerings power the U-Haul app, and PNC says they save time and cost while improving the customer and employee experience. The bank's product here is not a loan or a deposit but pipes inside someone else's customer journey. m:…6474

Fraud as a capital decision

BioCatch's new public-private advisory board extends the plumbing argument into fraud and government payments. The board's founding members are former IRS Criminal Investigation chief Guy Ficco, former Australian Taxation Office deputy commissioner John Ford, and former Israel Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority director-general Shlomit Wagman, and the board will work with BioCatch and its customers to alert government offices to high-risk payments before those offices transfer tax, unemployment, pension and other disbursements. No specific government partnerships or pilot programs resulting from the board's formation have been disclosed yet. m:…0078

The scale of the problem cited is large. Research from the OECD shows public bodies can lose up to 5 per cent of their annual spending to fraud and related losses, and the US Government Accountability Office estimates the US federal government alone loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud every year. BioCatch says that as of the end of the third quarter of 2026, more than 400 financial institutions deploy its solutions, analyzing 20 billion user sessions a month, continuously collecting more than 3,000 anonymized data points including keystroke and mouse activity, AI agent usage and jailbroken devices. Those figures are the company's own, but the board's composition signals that fraud prevention is now a public-sector conversation, not just a bank control function. m:…0078

BioCatch's companion argument, in a blog post on fraud architecture, is that this is ultimately a capital allocation question. Under the Basel III operational risk framework, fraud losses directly increase risk-weighted assets, the denominator of the CET1 calculation, requiring incremental equity capital, while preventing fraud losses and removing operational cost improves the return-on-tangible-common-equity numerator without requiring additional equity capital. Fragmented fraud stacks, the post argues, mean three to five vendor contracts, integration overhead, manual review headcount and model retraining fees, plus genuine customers declined because the decisioning system lacked confidence, and 12 to 30 months of development capacity consumed before the stack is operational. Consolidated platforms analyzed at scale, the company says, demonstrate a 76.4 per cent average decline in fraud losses and 15 times return on investment over the investment period, with the premium price of a behavior-first platform recovered within 18 months. The post also cites JPMorgan's commitment to 17 per cent return on tangible common equity through the business cycle and medium-term targets of 17 to 18 per cent at Wells Fargo and Bank of America, as the board-level numbers fraud architecture ultimately moves. m:…2297

The thread across all three stories is that banking advantage is moving into infrastructure customers never see. A virtual bank's core determines what loans it can offer, an embedded payments API determines whether a roadside customer gets money in real time, and a fraud stack determines how much equity a bank must hold against operational risk. The winners are the ones whose plumbing lets the business change fastest. m:…5052