The Business

Cloud-native core banking software provider, rebuilding the technology banks run on. Headquartered in London, with teams across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Works with tier-one banks including Lloyds, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Chartered and Intesa Sanpaolo

Thought Machine builds the software that drags banks off their creaking legacy systems and onto the cloud. So their own office was never going to look like a bank’s. The brief: one space for town halls, international calls, filming content, private conversations, and the kind of collaboration that never happens in a booked meeting room. We built Think Tank…one of our favourite projects to date, and we’re already back in designing the next phase.

The Vision

Our vision for Think Tank was a space that didn’t choose between being useful and being interesting because for a client rebuilding banking’s infrastructure from scratch, “useful” and “interesting” were never supposed to be separate conversations. Rather than design five rooms for five functions, we set out to design one space that could hold all five at once and still feel considered in every mode, never a stage that’s “also” a café, or a lounge that’s “just” overflow.

The idea was to let the room itself do the flexing, not the furniture. A single architectural move, one set of bi-fold doors through the centre became the whole design logic: open, and it’s one generous space built for scale; closed, two rooms with their own identity and acoustics, built for focus. Everything else was designed to hold up in both states, from lighting to layout to sightlines.

And we wanted the space to look like it belonged to a company modernising banking, not one that happened to work in it cloud-native, current, a little bit playful. When the CEO mentioned the café should nod to the industry, that became licence to design in the small, specific details rather than a generic “fintech” mood board, the “Start of Day” / “End of Day” illuminated signage came directly out of that brief.

The Change

Think Tank gives Thought Machine something most businesses don’t have: one space that can host the whole company, then get out of its own way.

Town halls, launches and calls with colleagues overseas happen on a proper stage with screens built for the job, so there’s no hiring a venue and no hoping the dial-in works. The in-house content team can record podcasts and video in the lounge without booking a studio, and soundproofing throughout means client calls, recordings and quiet team talks can run at the same time without anyone tiptoeing around each other.

The café does more commercial work than it looks like. A full barista bar gives engineers a reason to be in the building (and fuelled), and gives clients and guests somewhere to be looked after. Beer taps turn the end of the day into the sort of informal gathering that builds a culture. The booths and the informal seating mean small groups can hold a serious conversation or a spontaneous one without taking over a meeting room.

The Achievement

The best review a fit-out can get is a second brief. Thought Machine’s team had barely settled into Think Tank before we were back in designing the next phase of their space. We’ll share more on that soon, but the short version is that a client who sees the finished room and says “go again” has told you everything about how it turned out.

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