Verity heads up the CEO's office at Thought Machine, and as Chief of Staff is responsible for supporting the CEO in the development and execution of corporate strategy. Verity and her team are also responsible for the execution of key company-wide initiatives, launching and scaling new cross-functional programs, and managing company-wide reporting.
Verity previously spent more than five years at Elixirr, a boutique consultancy, where she focused on strategy definition, business/digital transformation and process improvement/cost reduction in financial services and technology. Verity has worked across Europe and Africa advising C-suite and senior leaders within global banks, insurance and pensions providers.
Verity is a trustee of London-based charity, The Boxing Academy, supporting disadvantaged young people in London. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Cambridge.
Laz heads up Thought Machine’s EMEA sales engineering department and he and his team are responsible for all pre-sales activities in the region. Laz works with clients to understand their needs and validate the Vault platform, focusing on articulating the product's value and enabling financial institutions to transform their core systems.
Prior to Thought Machine, Laz worked with other core banking vendors, and before that worked in the banking sector for eight years.
Brad is the general manager of North America and managing director of global partnerships for Thought Machine. Prior to Thought Machine, Brad spent ten years at AWS as managing director of startup business development, a global business unit consisting of hundreds of employees across 22 countries. At this role, Brad was responsible for building and executing on a strategy to gain broad adoption of AWS by technology startups and scaleups worldwide.
Prior to AWS, Brad spent 18 years in various senior leadership roles within the commercial, retail and treasury management units of multiple US banks, including Comerica Bank, Riggs/PNC, Citizens Bank/SunTrust, Norwest/Wells Fargo, and Square 1 Bank, a challenger bank where he was a founding member of the bank’s senior leadership team.
Paul Taylor founded Thought Machine in 2014 because he wanted to use the same cloud technology he was exposed to while at Google to solve the banking industry’s legacy infrastructure problem. He believed something needed to be done about the way most banking systems were so cumbersome and awkward, not to mention deeply frustrating and practically useless for millions of end users.
Thought Machine’s core banking engine Vault was born in the spring of 2015 to liberate banks from archaic legacy systems. Will Montgomery wrote the code while Paul acted as product manager – setting and guiding the overall direction of the system – a role he still plays today.
Prior to Thought Machine, Paul founded two software companies, Rhetorical Systems and Phonetic Arts, and both were acquired by global software companies, Nuance and Google. After Phonetic Arts was acquired by Google in 2010, Paul joined Google to lead a team of engineers responsible for launching the pioneering text-to-speech system in 2012. This system still provides the basis for all of Google’s speech output, including driving directions, voice search and accessibility to machine translation. The system has been installed on more than a billion phones since 2012.
Paul is the published author of Text-To-Speech Synthesis, lecturer in Linguistics at Cambridge University, and director of the Centre for Speech Research at Edinburgh University.
