The Powerof Partner ships

Justus Roux, Head of Solutions Engineering, EMEA, at Mambu, says that trust and compatible culture can deliver best-in-class customer journeys

THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: ‘Partnerships’ is one of the current buzzwords in finance. What does it mean to you?

JUSTUS ROUX: To define that, we need to step back and ask who those partners are because within the solution engineering side at Mambu, we normally see three types of partnerships.

One is technology partners. Mambu is but one part of building a banking ecosystem, so we have different technology partners that we integrate with, either on the card side or the front-end. We also have the service integrators. Think of these as the big consulting companies, among which are some niche consulting firms that know specific markets well. We have been blessed by having great relationships with different top-line consultancies, specifically in EMEA, and also worldwide.

And then, obviously, because we build in the Cloud, we also have the Cloud service providers. How you focus and deal with each of these partners is different because they each have their own needs.

TFM: So, what are the key ingredients to make any partnership work?

JR: Ultimately, it comes down to one thing – culture. You need to be aligned in terms of what you want to build. With Mambu, we’ve been fortunate in where some of our biggest success stories are; speedboats or spin-offs of banks, which have a culture that is different from the legacy approach.

Instead of having multiple committees signing things off and taking four or five years for implementation, there is a recognition of the need to push something to the market in three months, six months, and see if it works. Now, that’s a partnership.

We have the client, but, as I said earlier, we don’t do everything – we are one part of a bigger ecosystem, so we need to have partners that also have the same culture and value set to be able to deliver. And we all sell trust, right? A partnership is a trust agreement. So, if we know where we’re going, and what we want to move towards, then it’s a lot easier to get to that success point.

TFM: How does Mambu operate within its partnerships?

JR: We are transparent, first and foremost. When we talk to potential partners, in terms of the ecosystem, we tell them exactly where we are and what we want. We know what’s best for the client is also what’s best for us.

It always comes back to building that constant relationship and being honest with ourselves, as an organisation, and also with our customers, and our partners, in where we stand with each other, and what we want. If we have the same culture, the same vision, and the same approach, everything falls into place.

TFM: How do legacy banks fit into this new environment? Are they nimble enough to deliver the ultimate customer experience?

JR: I think this is fascinating because a lot of legacy banks will build a new app for customers, or build a particular user journey, because that’s what the market wants. But they can only build so much, depending on how good their foundations are. Legacy banks have big old cores – and fine, it worked for them – but they can’t have that snappy new specific channel or new app, because they are limited to what the core makes available to them.

So, it’s all about asking, ‘how can I make the user experience better for my clients?’. If you have cool and innovative journeys, or you interact with other value-added services – such as insurance, maybe buying electricity, or playing the lotto – these things all need to come together in a space that customers trust and want to engage with. This is where other fintechs, like Mobiquity, that we partner with, build the secret sauce through a customer experience that differentiates one bank from another – because, at the end of the day, a card is a card, a loan is a loan, right? example. This comes back to the idea of creating a one-stop shop. We’re talking here about a bank being the underlying provider, but it might be someone else doing it, in future.

If we think of an API-first, Cloud-native solution, like Mambu, we expose various different APIs for these front-end guys to be able to build the best user journeys. So, once we understand what the customer wants, we need to make sure we have the architecture underneath to service that.

TFM: Do you think we’ll get to a point where you’re not just buying a banking product through your banking app, but any product you want?

JR: I think we’re already there. Some sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and European banks already have the ability to integrate various other services.

TFM: You mention trust being a key component, but how can newer banks compete on that when the more traditional financial institutions seem to command consumer confidence?

JR: It’s true that digitisation sometimes seems to go against this notion of trust. Digital banks have so many abstract processes – everyone is trying to take the human connection away, building bots, etc – when sometimes, as a customer, you just want to speak with someone to open a bank account personally or when something goes wrong.

The high street banks already have that component of trust, so, how do we introduce it into the digital process so the customer feels that they are being listened to? That’s where clever AI, data learning, and communication come in, because trust is developed through user experience.

At the end of the day, as the market changes, you have to ask where are providers getting value? Banks currently get value back in deposits and in lending, but there are insurance plays that we can talk about, there is crypto investment, for

HAND IN HAND: THREE PARTNERSHIPS IN PRACTICE

Since 2011, Mambu has partnered with nearly 200 clients across the globe, including both legacy banking providers and digital-first challengers. Among some of the most notable are Western Union, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, N26, BancoEstado, OakNorth, Raiffeisen Bank, ABN AMRO, Orange Bank, Bank Islam, TNEX, Cake, Timo, Bank INA and Bank Jago.

Mambu And Orange Bank

In April this year, Orange Bank, the mobile bank launched by French telecom Orange in 2017, announced that it would migrate its services in France to Mambu’s Cloud banking platform, hosted on AWS. It follows the 2019 launch of Orange Bank in Spain on Mambu’s operating system and signals the bank’s intention to operate a single banking platform, allowing it to scale Europe-wide.

Mambu CEO, Eugene Danilkis said: “Orange Bank is a great example of how Mambu empowers companies to scale with flexibility and agility, while leveraging the Cloud. Our platform was born to empower our customers to create delightful financial experiences quickly.”

Mambu And Allica Bank

Allica Bank, a UK neobank focussed on serving the needs of established SMEs, announced the purchase of Allied Irish Bank’s GB small and medium-sized business customers in November 2021.

This complex loan portfolio required a technology solution to help Allica migrate customers in a matter of months.

If a client can get the feedback they want, even if it’s from a ‘person’ who is AI-generated; if they can interact with their bank in a way that makes them feel heard, then the rest is easy. What we need to have at the back of our minds on this digital journey is that trust is about relationships and talking to each other.

Mambu’s composable architecture seamlessly integrated with Allica’s Cloud-led tech stack and the platform now supports Allica in delivering bespoke lending products that are specifically designed with small and medium-sized businesses in mind.

Mambu And Bancoestado

Chile’s only state-owned bank and largest financial institution, serving 13 million customers, called on Mambu to digitise its transactional services in 2021.

BancoEstado said its aim at the time was to implement ‘innovative technology that includes an open architecture that offers modern integration models to create an easy-to-use bank’.