28 September 2023
By: Thought Machine
We selected Accenture to be part of our inaugural delivery partner training programme, joining the Configuration Services Project, based at our London headquarters. The programme aims to facilitate on-site learning and develop specialist knowledge to build smart contracts for Vault Core clients.
Accenture put together a team of six experts from key European markets to then pass on their learnings to create Centres of Excellence around the world. Our Inception engineering team then built and delivered a bespoke training programme for the Accenture experts. This is the first time we have collaborated so closely with a partner, as we increasingly look to partners to deliver successfully for our clients.
Our modern core banking technology uses real-time APIs and a smart contract framework. Smart contracts enable a unique way of building customisable products through configurable parameters and logic that define the product lifecycle and behaviour, all written in Python code.
The Accenture experts were part of our engineering team, gaining exposure to every smart contract in our Product Library. The Product Library contains pre-written smart contracts that financial institutions can modify according to their needs. The team became familiar with implementing various changes to how a smart contract is built and written, giving them the tools to optimise the performance of smart contracts that not only meet clients’ requirements but are implemented in the most performant way.
Here are some of the key benefits that the team drew from their time working on the Configuration Services Project:
Operations Efficiency: Accenture drew on its extensive banking industry experience to elevate the production-readiness of smart contracts in the Product Library, enabling clients to adopt them with minimal configuration effort. Rigorous testing ensured their ability to deal with diverse real-world scenarios, for instance, ensuring the proper handling of leap years and negative interest rates.
Financial Product Development: We continually improve and enhance our working methods and best practices at Thought Machine. As part of this culture, Accenture built the first smart contract utilising our new feature-based Financial Product Development Approach, including using Common Business Features and Product Composition. The Accenture team provided valuable learnings that helped refine and develop this approach.
Performance Optimisation: Financial products represented by smart contracts can be highly complex. For example, a single monetary transaction could trigger multiple postings to represent the flow of funds accurately. Accenture’s team implemented key changes to the Product Library contracts to help make them more performant. Together, we significantly reduced the number of postings generated by the smart contracts, in some operations, by up to 70%. For example, when optimising credit card smart contracts, postings for interest billing were reduced from 6 to 2, leading to a 66% reduction. The aim of reducing postings is to further simplify a smart contract, which in turn can optimise performance and improve the overall scalability of the product.
Technical Enhancements for Engineers: Our recent release of version 4.0 of the smart contract language API offers a more intuitive approach to contract writing. This enhanced API improves the contract writer experience, boosts the performance of the contract execution, and reduces the learning curve for anyone building a financial product. Accenture helped to test out the new contracts language, contributing to the upgrade of the Product Library.
In partnership, we help financial institutions running on Thought Machine’s core banking platform to optimise efficiency and realise benefits faster.
Accenture has over 135 Thought Machine-certified professionals in over 15 countries through our Enablement programme. The resources can readily meet global banking needs, with an emphasis on scaling key markets. Find out more about how we are working together here.