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Fintechs, neobanks, challengers, big tech, regtech, infotech... The buzzwords are endless but offer no more insight into an industry than a cursory term. We are a fintech - and proud so. But what does it mean to be a fintech? What do we do that makes us different? What approaches do we embrace that make us stand out in the industry? How do we tackle challenges and grow from them? What makes Mambu... Mambu?

To give you a peek behind the curtains to demystify how we operate, move, grow and learn, we have introduced a blog series: Inside Mambu. Delving from business to engineering, we will post regular blogs that tell our story. If you find this engaging, why not subscribe for updates or reach out to us.

The future of financial services is a moving target. The time when institutions could plan to introduce new products over a two year period or implement system changes with a five-year horizon has drawn to a close. To say we operate in an unpredictable time is an understatement, but how do you plan for an unknown future?

If we look beyond the surface of the general unpredictability of financial services over the past decade, certain patterns and processes emerge as a guide to navigating change. We have developed processes to understand customer needs and collaborate with them to translate these into services that can be rolled out to everyone.

Understand the market dynamics

It begins with reliable and dedicated market intelligence across different sectors. This helps us understand not just customer needs, but market requirements for long term growth and sustainability. A team of solution engineers then works with both customers and prospective customers to assess and understand requirements. Together with global and regional market insights and spotted trends, customer feedback and active research, we can advise customers on the best routes to building their platform and ecosystem.

Co-development of solutions

As a cloud banking platform delivered in a pure SaaS model, we follow a drastically different path to development than traditional software vendors. We co-develop solutions. It begins with our customers whether they be traditional banks, nimble fintechs or telecom operators to name just a few. However the process is not just between two parties, we work with partners, both strategic and technology players, to identify opportunities for enhancements in our platform via real-world needs, business cases and architectures. This approach gives us an outside-in view, along with a myriad of different perspectives of a specific requirement.

We also actively engage in industry events to gather ideas, trends and new patterns that contribute to our product strategy, design and roadmap, both technically and functionally.

Evolutionary architecture

Our software development life cycle is driven by the minimal viable product (MVP) and continuous delivery practices which allow us to validate the hypothesis we make during the research and design stages, which continuously and iteratively shape the capability of the platform to the needs of prospects and customers.

Mambu functional capability is build-based on a composable architecture philosophy where the final end-to-end solution is designed and implemented by composing different APIs of internal and external services, each focusing on their specific strengths, enabling best-of-service type solutions to financial institutions. We work with partners as no single vendor can be the best at every part of an architecture. Our composable philosophy accommodates an evolutionary architecture as well as the ability to build for future approaches that are the driving force behind any innovative tech-driven platform.

With this approach, our customers no longer have to predict all possible implementation and evolution scenarios, but rather allow for flexibility of changing certain parts with whatever is required or available at the given time in the future.

Prioritise integration

To enable a composable architecture, Mambu was designed with the ability to integrate being a priority. There are multiple modern and lightweight integration mechanisms available supporting all spectrum of integration scenarios. Customers choose the components they need, they can combine best-for-purpose software from leading global technology providers allowing for changing business and market requirements.

The Mambu platform invests in pre-built integrations with several best-of-service technology providers focused on areas such as payments, cards, accounting, reporting, credit scoring, origination, and many others. Our ability to integrate services either directly via APIs or on top of our process orchestrator means we can build productised connectors to many of the leading technology providers. While this simplifies the build for customers, it still gives them control of the entire architecture.

Looking for patterns

Aside from market influences, we have a team that actively scours the market for new partners, systems to integrate with that can add value to our customer base - be they global solutions or active in just one market.

Our approach to planning in an unpredictable market is reliant on a non-negotiable requirement - the need to be flexible. We can only see the patterns that emerge in markets, learn, develop, deploy and grow because of our ability to listen to external voices and change to meet the requirements. This agility means we can help customers evolve faster at lower risk and cost.

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Elliott Limb
With over 20 years in banking and fintech, Elliott has been named as one of the most influential people in fintech. At Mambu, Elliott is focused on a customer-centric approach to doing business, growing revenue and helping banks build flexible and scalable solutions.
Elliott Limb