The Mambu core banking platform

German FinTech company N26, operating a mobile bank app that is currently available in 24 European countries, catapulted itself to top continental unicorn status last week, raising USD 300m at a USD 2.7m valuation that put it ahead of media darling Revolut. So the question is, who sold the gold diggers the shovels?

The shovels, as it may be, come from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), fully cloud-based, digital core banking platform vendor Mambu. N26 had transitioned to the vendor platform in late 2016 after initially starting its business on a partner bank’s systems. The migration eliminated a large chunk of operating cost, allowed N26 to take full ownership of customer data, and brought the necessary flexibility to scale the business from about 500,000 customers to now more than 2.3m.

Mambu’s customer base includes FinTech startups like N26, incumbent financial institutions that are looking to launch alternative digital products (e.g., ABN AMRO’s digital spinoff new10), as well as firms in adjacent industries that are branching out into financial services, such as Mynt, a subsidiary of leading Filipino telecom company Globe Telecom with a customer base of over 60 million.

Mambu offers a cloud-native solution driving an open application programming interface (API)-enabled architecture, with over 6000 highly configurable loan and deposit products supported. The Mambu core solution can be extended through the Mambu Process Orchestrator (MPO), a single platform for bespoke business logic, integration management and no-code/low-code process design with a visual development environment.

Mambu Process Orchestrator (MPO) components

Mambu opened a Singapore office at the end of 2016. Competitors that also positioned themselves to enter the Asian market from this South-East Asian hub include Moven, leading influencer Brett King’s (of “Bank 4.0” fame) company, as well as Fidor Solutions. Both these companies operate regulated banking entities in their respective home jurisdictions, and have spun out their software platforms as a separate business, while Mambu is a pure-play core banking system provider. Which of these companies will we see in Japan first?