Mambu offers a different type of banking and lending solution

With markets, behavior and customer demands changing rapidly, financial institutions must act quickly. And with McKinsey predicting that the pace of change in the banking industry will increase significantly over the next few years, banks and lenders need a solution to help them stay ahead of the curve.

Mambu is a SaaS, cloud-based, API-powered banking and financial services platform, designed to drive financial innovation, bring solutions to market faster, reduce cost barriers and allow ecosystems to expand.

“I firmly believe that the core banking world is very niche,” explains Nick Lawler, Mambu’s market sales director for UK&I. “What we do, we cannot do as an individual. And it’s the same for any business.

“No one person can deliver a transformational change to a bank or a building society or a financial institution. You have to look at the wider ecosystem. That’s my role, to pull it all together, and that’s really what Mambu does as well.”

Founded in 2011, Mambu’s client list today includes fintech start-ups, telcos and top-tier banks, operating on six continents and helping clients constantly change the way financial institutions operate and innovate.

Another type of banking solution

As Lawler explains, offering a completely open architecture, Mambu is a different kind of banking solution. “Some people at that time, or even now, will choose to build a system in-house. But if you build a system internally, you depend on those who built it to retain their skills and knowledge.

“For some people, a modular approach works. But there are other people out there who want to embrace this modern technology. And that’s where we come in with composite banking.”

A term coined by Mambu, composable banking provides components that can be selected and put together in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.

“We do current accounts across the board,” Lawler explains. “And we support lenders through a single codebase. It’s one platform globally, it’s SaaS. We regularly push new releases to make sure our customers have the latest version. That’s part of what we do.”

With today’s turbulent economic times, financial institutions must act quickly, launching and scaling products at rapid speed. As Lawler describes, Mambu gives financial institutions the flexibility to quickly build a product, launch it to market and test it, all in a true SaaS model.

“What we’ve seen is that there’s a big change in the market that works for both mortgages and savings,” he says. “The interest rate changes we have seen have led to an increase in mortgage interest rates. So that means mortgage lenders are withdrawing their products, they have to launch new products quickly and put them on the market.

“But on the flip side of that coin, interest rates on deposits are rising. They’ve been at historic lows, which now means people have to react quickly to the market. You have to be competitive or you lose your deposits and customers may leave your business and go to the next bank that is faster to market with a better product.”

Changes like this in an older stack take time. “There might be a lot of testing, you might have to go back to your provider, and it might take weeks.

“In the market, weeks are a long time,” Lawler explains. “Suddenly you either haven’t had the mortgage product you want on the market and you’ve sold at a lower price, or the savings rate is paying too little, which means people are going to your competitors.”

With the global lending market expected to reach USD 8.9tn in 2025, and USD 11.6tn in 2030, flexibility is key for companies looking to enter or expand into personal and corporate lending.

“What Mambu does is allow financial institutions the flexibility to quickly build a product, launch it to market and test it in this SaaS model,” comments Lawler. “Mambu is a configurable solution. If you had a bank that wants to have freedom in their choices of how they serve their customers to work with their own origination partner or build internally or do their own usage flows on digital banking, Mambu supports that.

“Whether it’s a mortgage application or a deposit application, we can support it, run it, we can bring in the relevant customer fields,” he says. “We allow our customers to basically be their own institution, supporting their own needs, but driven by a global solution.”

Give power to customers

As Lawler explains, Mambu’s goal is ultimately to empower its customers. “A customer wants the same solution in Brazil as in the UK or Australia. But each of those customers will use that solution in a slightly different way and then put orchestration and configuration around it for the way they want to work.

“What we give them is that freedom. From a mortgage perspective, they may be linked to older stacks with large change requests and delays in product changes. We remove that for them, we let them update products quickly, and plug-and-play with the partners they choose.”

With its cloud-native platform, Mambu allows financial institutions to constantly improve and be nimble and ready for change when it happens.

“From a deposit angle, rates move quickly,” Lawler explains. “And it works both ways. You can find yourself at the top of the best buy table. Maybe you don’t want to be number one, in which case you can pull the product and put a new one on the market. Or maybe you want to be number one because you want to do something on the lending line or launch an aggressive product. We’re there to support it all the way.”

Coping with turbulent economic times

Recent news about financial sector crises, from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to the rescue of Credit Suisse, has highlighted the turbulent economic environment we live in. As Lawler explains, the UK and Ireland are at the forefront of banking and technology. “We are a highly regulated, stable environment,” he comments. “We saw what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, they had a situation that would not have been allowed in the UK.”

From a Mambu perspective, a number of financial institutions have chosen its platform to help them bring solutions to market faster, reduce cost barriers and allow ecosystems to expand.

“We’ve seen a wave of new entrants, and we’ve driven the bulk of them,” Lawler says. Since the wave of new entrants into the market, the number of new banks has slowed in the UK as the market changes. “But from a Mambu perspective, we signed 48 new logos and any core supplier globally would bet on getting that traction,” adds Lawler.

As the launch of the new banks has slowed down, Mambu is looking to innovate with new solutions in the brownfield area.

“We are now stepping up and working, not just with greenfield projects, new players,” explains Lawler. “We are also moving into brownfield, true transformational migration plays in the UK, which tend to be riskier.

– People see the strength in the Mambu solution. We help move large financial institutions away from legacy technology stacks, and people see the benefits and believe in it.

“We haven’t just noticed anything. We are a real modern stack, he says. – We will continue to grow in the region. We will continue to mature the solution, and the people around us, grow as a business, which is an exciting step for Mambu.”

With financial institutions looking to modernize, much of it comes down to cultural changes in the business. “You want people who have worked in a bank for 10 or 20 years who have never been through this process,” Lawler explains. “They’ve only worked with one system, and that system is all they know. People will be nervous from board level to the grassroots.

“That’s where we come in. We support it. And we will continue to do so over the next year and beyond.

“We’re not just a supplier, we’re a partner. From customer success and customer value to partnership, we continue to stay with our customers and work with them and make sure we’re doing the best for them.”