VTB’s Push into UK Retail: Core Banking Choices, License Hurdles & Lessons from Marcus’ Finacle Rollout

The decision by VTB in 2017 to apply for a UK banking licence and adopt Sopra Banking Software illustrates the strategic imperative for established financial institutions seeking entry into competitive retail markets: selecting a core banking system that supports scalability, regulatory adherence, and customer-facing agility. That VTB opted for a hosted solution suggests a prioritization of operational ease and risk containment while gaining market access.

By comparison, Goldman Sachs’ launch of Marcus in the UK in 2018 underscores a different, yet related, digital entry strategy. Marcus combined a growth push into savings products with a modern tech stack leveraging open core platforms—Finacle for core banking services, particularly its cloud-hosted lending module—allowing rapid deployment and customer acquisition. [2][4] Both VTB’s and Marcus’s approaches share a reliance on core systems that allow remote/cloud hosting, flexibility in product configuration, and support for straight-through processing to meet modern customer expectations and regulatory scrutiny.

The acquisition of Sopra Banking Software by Axway (2024), the energized push from VPBank to modernize on Temenos+Red Hat OpenShift (2025), and Marcus’s deployment of Finacle, all reflect an industry shifting toward composable, cloud-native, and API-driven architectures. [6][7][9][2] Meanwhile, rules such as deposit thresholds triggering ring-fencing (e.g., over £25 billion in the UK) mean incumbent banks launching retail franchises need to plan for financial separation, regulatory compliance and governance issues early. [5]

Strategic implications are multiple: banks entering retail markets from investment banking or other verticals must build or acquire expertise in customer operations, risk management, and regulatory licensing; technology selection becomes central not just for operations but also for regulatory and capital planning; vendors capable of delivering hosted, cloud-based, composable platforms stand to gain; and regulatory thresholds and compliance burdens increasingly act as constraints or inflection points for digital banking business model design.

Open questions include: Did VTB ultimately succeed in getting its UK retail licences and launching retail business using Sopra? What has been the performance of Marcus UK since launch relative to digital banking peers? How are vendors like Sopra and Temenos positioned today in terms of cloud-native vs hosted offerings, and how do they differentiate? And how have regulatory requirements (ring-fencing, deposit insurance, Brexit implications) continued to shape or constrain these entry strategies?