Creating greater financial inclusion

GCS is the Dominican Republic’s leading fintech offering payments services to users across the Caribbean nations. The company’s flagship product, tPago, is the Dominican Republic’s first app that offers mobile payments services by empowering users to link bank accounts and credit cards on their cell phones. It also facilitates the disbursement of short-term loans for transactions originated in the wallet under a different company called tPresto.

GCS knew it needed to launch tPresto from a digital core, and the firm chose Mambu because of the agility, scalability and time to market that comes from a 100% cloud-native, pure SaaS and API-driven platform. By owning the project early on and composing it along the way, tPresto delivered user experiences that were second to none.

The company began by designing payment loans plans for traditional transactions, namely under fixed interest rates and terms, that extended anywhere from a week to thirty days.

A challenge presented itself in adapting this product to changing customer demands and shifting market conditions. Interest was calculated as a percentage of the opening balance. Customers, however, would likely expect to see some calculations reflected in the outstanding principal in a manner that would best insure equal installments. While surprises in technology and all the wonders innovation brings are always welcome on the product end, continuity is often a blessing when the amount owed comes due in the bill.

With that in mind, GCS had to decide which platform would best ensure a rapid rollout as well as rapid changes to accounts when needed? The answer was Mambu, whose 100% cloud-native digital banking core offered the best plan for launching a product and tweaking its functions quickly and nimbly when needed.

With Mambu’s support, the tPresto team took ownership of its product from the first day, composing its unique offering and value proposition on the digital banking platform. By taking charge of the design and build of the project early on, essentially being its own boss instead of farming out the work to a provider, tPresto found it would be much more responsive when adapting its offering to shifting economic and business realities.

Ivan Jimenez, General Manager, tPresto by GCS: “We chose Mambu because of its composable approach to building a digital financial entity on a purely digital banking core. By assuming ownership of this product early on, we are now offering the products and services our users need most and can adjust our offering to customer needs when conditions warrant. No other modular provider could assure us of the responsiveness we’d need to successfully deliver products and services to what our customers really needed."

After kicking off in March 2022, tPresto went live in roughly five months in August that same year. As with any business, challenges arose. Clients would pay off their loans at different times and under their own terms. Some clients would pay in full early on, often on the same date in which the loan was disbursed. Interest accrual parameters had to be set, adjusted and readjusted to reflect these highly individualized funding structures. Some interest rates for loans that were paid off had to quickly be reset to zero in order to avoid charging unwarranted additional interest. In today’s digital day and age, all it takes is the swipe of a thumb across a smartphone for an unhappy customer to opt for a competitor.

Mambu’s composable platform empowered tPresto to create an ecosystem to deliver the needed responsiveness to correctly manage each account. GCS elected Mambu because of the agility and scalability it discovered when developing and owning its project from the onset, and today, the company has succeeded by facilitating credit and commerce in ways that support sustainable development and better livelihoods in this crucial Caribbean market. For Mambu, the success story of tPresto represents another example of the added value a fully cloud-native digital banking core brings to global financial industries.

Paula Neira, Regional Director at Mambu: "Flexibility and agility are not only keys to success in today’s banking world, they are prerequisites. On Mambu’s core, GCS took ownership of what it wanted to build and bring to market from the onset. In doing so, tPresto can provide access to lending terms that satisfy each and every end user."