About
About Malai.
Malai is a reference UK retail banking platform — built end-to-end on synthetic data, so prospective operators can read the architecture, walk the customer journey, and evaluate the commercial path before commissioning it.
If your team is weighing licensing, commissioning, or white-label hosting a retail bank stack, this page covers why Malai exists and how it's built.
Why it exists
There was no honest reference.
A bank decision-maker evaluating a platform vendor has two usual options: a slide deck that claims production-grade architecture, or a demo behind a vendor's NDA. Neither lets the buyer's engineers read the code. Neither shows the customer journey end-to-end. Neither names the commercial path before the contract.
Malai exists to be that reference. It's a UK retail bank assembled honestly — a banking core with enforced module boundaries, a double-entry ledger with a sum-to-zero invariant, a hash-chained audit trail, a typed customer portal running the journey end-to-end, and infrastructure-as-code that stands the whole thing up on a cloud-native footprint. Same shape a real bank's platform team would inherit. Different data.
It is not a bank. It holds no customer money, processes no real payments, and connects to no payment rails. The point isn't to be a bank — the point is to be the reference an operator can read, fork, license as a managed offering, commission a bespoke build on top of, or white-label and run as their own.
How we work
Three working principles.
Malai is built by a small group of platform engineers working in the open. We don't make claims about team size — we make claims about the work. These are the three commitments behind every page on this site.
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Read the code, not the deck.
Every architectural claim on this site is grounded in a file you can grep for. Build-time fences keep module boundaries honest, and the typed API contract generates the customer portal's client code so the wire format and the UI cannot drift. There is no demonstration-purposes magic between what the site says and what the codebase does.
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Synthetic data, by design.
Every customer, account holder, transaction, ledger entry, and audit event in Malai is generated. Sort codes sit in a Malai-reserved range; account numbers validate through the standard UK modulus check; payment rails are not wired in. The data shape matches a real UK retail bank. The data itself is reference fiction.
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Public, on principle.
The architecture page, the security posture, the v2 roadmap, and the commercial path live on this site — before the walkthrough call. A bank operator should be able to disqualify Malai (or shortlist it) without scheduling time with us first.
Malai is a reference platform built on synthetic data. Its job is to be evaluated — read, walked through, taken apart, and either dismissed or taken further. Not to hold customer money.
Next step
Want a walkthrough?
Thirty minutes, over a video call. We run the demo end-to-end — architecture, customer journey, and the commercial path — and answer the questions a deck can't. No follow-on drip. Just the call.