Vanquis Bank picks Freshworks to unify service ops post-Gateway

UK specialist bank Vanquis selects Freshservice to consolidate service management as its flagship digital transformation programme nears completion.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Fri, 10 July 2026

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Vanquis, the UK specialist bank focused on underserved credit markets, has chosen Freshworks' Freshservice platform to anchor its internal IT and enterprise service operations, as the bank's multi-year Gateway modernisation programme approaches its final phase. The move signals a broader pattern among regulated financial institutions: completing a core infrastructure overhaul only to find that the operational layer sitting on top still runs on fragmented, legacy tooling.

Gateway was designed to make Vanquis simpler, more scalable, and digital-first. As the programme's heavier lifting draws to a close, the bank is now addressing what often follows large transformation initiatives: a proliferation of disconnected service desks, asset registries, and workflow tools that undermine the efficiency gains that the transformation was meant to deliver. Freshservice consolidates IT service management (ITSM), asset management (ITAM), operations management (ITOM), and enterprise service management across HR, finance, and facilities onto a single platform with a shared data layer.

From core banking to operational fabric

Jem Walters, Chief Technology Officer at Vanquis, framed the selection in terms of colleague experience rather than IT infrastructure. "Freshservice gives us a more intuitive and flexible platform to manage service delivery, automate critical workflows and improve the colleague experience as we continue building a more agile, digital-first organisation," he said. The language is deliberate: in a regulated bank, internal service failure cascades quickly into customer-facing risk, compliance delays, and audit exposure.

Freshworks positions Freshservice's embedded AI layer, branded Freddy AI, as the mechanism for automating repetitive triage and request-fulfilment tasks. Musidora Jorgensen, Freshworks' UK and Ireland Country Lead, noted that financial institutions face compounding pressure to modernise service delivery without sacrificing governance or resilience, two priorities that regulators including the Bank of England and the FCA have made central to their operational-resilience frameworks. The platform is described as offering measurable outcomes rather than a customisation-heavy implementation, which matters for a mid-sized specialist bank without a large internal engineering bench.

The broader convergence read

The Vanquis deal is modest in scale by enterprise-software standards, but it sits within a structurally significant pattern. UK financial services firms that completed core modernisation programmes between 2022 and 2025, typically migrating away from monolithic banking platforms, are now in a second wave of investment aimed at the operational and service layer. This second wave is attracting a different category of vendor: cloud-native SaaS platforms offering rapid deployment and AI-augmented workflows, rather than the large system integrators that dominated the first wave.

For Freshworks, the Vanquis win adds a regulated financial institution to a reference list that already includes names across manufacturing, media, and professional services. Competing platforms in this space include ServiceNow, which dominates the enterprise ITSM market at the upper end, and Atlassian's Jira Service Management, which competes at the mid-market. Freshworks positions Freshservice as faster to deploy and more intuitive than ServiceNow, a claim the company says, and one that resonates with banks that lack the dedicated ServiceNow administration teams common at tier-one institutions.

The macro read is that regulated industries, financial services and healthcare in particular, are now the primary battleground for AI-augmented service management platforms. The pitch is no longer about replacing a ticketing system; it is about reducing the operational friction that slows compliance workflows, incident escalation, and audit readiness. For cross-sector investors tracking enterprise software, the question is whether AI-native SaaS vendors can hold ground against ServiceNow's accelerating AI buildout, or whether consolidation pressure eventually collapses the mid-market tier.