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Meet Mambu, the SaaS cloud banking platform powering financial innovators everywhere.

Mambu

SaaS cloud banking platform

The digital conference centred on the important topic of how technology can be used to increase access and build new services for customers. Learn more about the takeaways in part two of the Q&A series or 

You talked about banks creating these ‘special snowflakes’ and customised products. How big of a danger is that to the speed and agility that the FI industry desperately needs to adopt going forward?

 It’s a gigantic danger. It’s not just in banking, it’s in IT, insurance companies, they’ve built up huge technical debt in the last decades. They have thousands of people employed in their IT departments. The language is often written on the mainframe where people may not even be around anymore who understand the language.

Werner Knoblich

You obviously want to configure the solution to your branding and so you can offer certain products, but you don’t want to create your own version where you need to do robust coding. If you do this in the right architecture and environment, as is the case with Mambu offering a pure SaaS service, all customers have the same code base. This means that when we make a change, it gets pushed to everyone in a day. You don't even have a chance to build your own fork in the software.

There are banks that choose a core banking application off the shelf, but then they customise this until it’s no longer ‘off the shelf’. Instead it becomes homegrown and carries heavy technical debt. The problem is then they’re not flexible and fast and always dependent on their own releases. You can only break this by making a paradigm shift.

 There's been a lot of M&A activity in the fintech and finance space lately. Just earlier today, HSBC bought a $35M stake in the fintech company Monese. What impact is this activity having on the industry and how banks serve their customers?

 about fintechs getting less funding and banks moving more steadily into this space. Incumbent banks are all looking to break this stalemate situation. They either create their own digital arms or acquire tech that’s on the market to better serve the needs of their customers. This is filling the gap of the less risk capital and less banking licences. There is clearly a need in the market, and it’s an opportunity for incumbents to catch up faster in this space.

 The underbanked and unbanked tend to be left behind in this shift to digital. What more can be done to make sure that doesn’t happen?

 Empowering the unbanked was the reason that Eugene and his fellow co-founders started Mambu nearly 12 years ago. They wanted to bring banking to the underbanked and to make banking and financial experiences delightful. This starts with the regulator. In some countries microloans finance everything because people don’t have the starting capital otherwise. Similarly not everyone has a passport to identify themselves, so if this is a requirement for opening a bank account for example, this is a barrier. There is a lot regulators can do to decrease these entry barriers as fintechs try to serve these markets.

 Let’s talk about the cloud. How do you deal with risk and compliance and KYC (know your customer) in a cloud environment?

The cloud environment does not change much from the core functionality of the onboarding, KYC, AML (anti-money laundering), or further capabilities. Cloud only changes the setup of how it runs and where the data resides. The big cloud providers have data centres mapped out across the world, so data sovereignty as a topic is not an issue anymore. From a security standpoint, Amazon, Google Cloud and Microsoft have stronger security and expertise than all IT departments combined. It’s a gut feeling that turns people away from cloud, but the reality is that the security is much better with these big providers. In the end, security risks are often from the human rather than the tech itself. There is still some hesitation, but this is changing.

Like what you see and want to learn more about this conversation? Read on for 

Q&A with The Banker: Eliminating technical debt and a paradigm shift to the cloud

The digital conference centred on the important topic of how technology can be used to increase access and build new services for customers. Learn more about the takeaways in part one of the Q&A series below or 

 What are the big changes you’re seeing in the banking industry right now?

 There is a clear decline in the issuing of new banking licences. There is also less risk capital available for the whole fintech space due to the macroeconomic environment. Additionally, large incumbent banks are increasing interest rates and are in much better shape than before, so they’re often spinning up their own fintechs or spinoffs and stepping in that direction.

 Yes, we’re seeing this interconnected ecosystem of incumbent banks and new fintechs starting to grow together. You mentioned interest rates, what are some of the other specific changes that have happened in the past year?

 Banks came to the realisation that they must do something, meaning they must move much faster away from legacy systems to better serve the demands of their end customers. Demands from customers have changed, due to our situation in the past years with the pandemic. Banks see a need to accelerate to be more agile.

 When we talk about the acceleration caused by the pandemic, what is the measurement of that change? The banking and FI industry has experienced a lot of change in the past year, but how many years have we shaved off in the shift to digital?

 People are more sensitive to what’s happening to their money. The time spent at home from the pandemic created much more demand, for instance we see this with wealth management. With zero interest on checking or deposit accounts, people realised they want to get smarter about their finances. This generates new demand, and banks and FIs need to find a way to serve this. As a result, there comes the acceleration of the need to deliver digital services much faster to end customers. The pressure is on, and also loyalty to incumbent banks is only decreasing.

 There are a lot of technological changes affecting people’s lives that come from other industries: online shopping, children’s schooling. How is the banking sector keeping pace with these new technologies in our lives?

: Very clearly, not fast enough. The reality is that the legacy core migrations are so difficult, and the situations the banks got themselves into makes it so they can’t move in an agile way. They’ve built up these monsters over decades with data centres that make it very hard to deliver something new and are inflexible. They’ve come to the realisation that they cannot easily migrate gigantic monoliths to a new system.

: Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a Fortune 100 bank, and they put the demand on us to state in their contract that they’re not allowed to customise the software. With Mambu, this is actually not necessary as we're SaaS-based, but the point is that they tried to protect themselves from falling into the trap of what they did in the past. The question is: how do they get out of it? A mass migration will take decades, so they need to see how they can chip away. Today's financial institutions need to provide new offerings without relying so heavily on IT resources. Product managers should be able to build something without needing developers to create these products. 

Learn more about Mambu's composable approach to banking and lending 

 or stay tuned for part two of the Q&A series.

Q&A with The Banker: Big scale migrations and the accelerated need to digitise

At Mambu, we’ve been on the forefront of the digital banking revolution for almost a decade, working closely with our customers as transformative changes swept through the banking and financial services industries in the UK, Europe and the Americas.

Harnessing this knowledge and experience, we established our Asia Pacific office in Singapore in 2016, with a Sydney office following shortly afterwards, in preparation for the digital banking wave we knew was to come. While some countries within the Asia Pacific region picked up the digital banking baton and ran with it early, others have been more reticent to embrace this brand new world.

Japan and Australia both saw first-gen digital banks launched as early as 2000, and have continued to be frontrunners in the space. More recently though, as mobile and API technology matured and became more reliable, the Asia Pacific digital banking landscape was transformed by organisations like Alibaba and Tencent, with the latter launching its digital bank subsidiary, WeBank, in 2015.

Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, India and Taiwan have also been proactive in welcoming new fintech players and challengers to the market, while regulatory changes in these countries have allowed and encouraged legacy banks to quickly adapt, diversify and test the market with new digital offerings in order to stay in the game.

Countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines are now in the early stages of the digital banking revolution, with new (and limited) digital banking licences being offered, or at least proposed, and many new players entering the market. Of course, a country’s digital banking capability is only as strong as its infrastructure, so we’re waiting with great anticipation to see how countries like Indonesia, which has mobile network and internet penetration of 92%, begin to come of age in the digital banking era.

Together with a fair amount of healthy competition between countries, it’s also exciting to see the innovative collaborations taking place between what would traditionally be thought of as competitors, for example, legacy banks working hand-in-hand with challenger banks and fintechs to launch new and exciting digital banking products, brands and joint ventures.

The Asia Pacific banking and financial services industry is at the precipice of a period of significant, transformative change over the coming 12 to 24 months, the impact of COVID-19 notwithstanding. In fact, the current global pandemic may actually force some countries  to speed up their response to digitisation of the banking industry, with a fast pivot to the provision of online products and services an absolute necessity.

SPECIAL REPORT: Rise of digital banking licences in the Asia Pacific

Mambu is very proud to be the sponsor of this special report, published by one of Asia Pacific’s most high profile banking and finance media outlets, The Asian Banker.

provides a comprehensive situation analysis of digital banking across the Asia Pacific region, with a particular focus on how digital banking licences are being rolled out in each country. After you’ve read the report, we are here to answer any questions you may have about taking your business to the next digital stage, or what the current regulatory framework means for your organisation. Get in touch with a Mambu team member 

Click here to download a copy of this special report.

The Asian Banker

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Rise of digital banking licences

Wondering how Mambu can help you get products to market faster, improve your business agility and elevate your customer experience?

We have all that covered in our live demo session. Join us as we walk through the Mambu platform, tour the partner ecosystem and show you why Mambu is the only true SaaS platform trusted by hundreds of financial businesses around the world.

Join us as we walk through the Mambu platform, tour the partner ecosystem and we can show you why Mambu is the only true SaaS platform trusted by hundreds of financial businesses around the world.