Secrets of Success: Ben Snowman, VP of Partnerships & Advisory at Mambu

Ben Snowman, VP of Partnerships & Advisory at Mambu, champions the cloud banking platform’s unique selling proposition (USP) centered on modernising core banking services.

Mambu’s goal is to empower financial institutions of all sizes to transition to the cloud, thereby enhancing agility, innovation, and cost efficiency. By evangelizing the concept of “building the new to replace the old,” Mambu facilitates seamless technology adoption, enabling clients to meet evolving market demands and customer preferences.

The primary problem Mambu solves for its customers lies in addressing the complexities of digital transformation within the banking sector. Financial institutions often struggle to adapt to market changes, personalize services, and future-proof their operations. Mambu serves as a technology enabler, providing the tools necessary for agility, flexibility, and innovation in product offerings. Through its composable banking framework and API-first approach, Mambu empowers clients to seamlessly design and deliver tailored financial solutions.

At the heart of Mambu’s brand values lies a commitment to leveling up access to exceptional banking experiences. Guided by principles of boldness, customer obsession, accountability, curiosity, unity, and diversity, Mambu fosters a culture of ownership, collaboration, and innovation. These values drive decision-making processes, ensuring a customer-centric approach and delivering impactful results.

Team culture is integral to Mambu’s success, with a focus on inclusivity and collaboration despite remote working arrangements. Utilizing tools like Natter for company-wide meetings facilitates communication and fosters a nurturing environment where employees feel empowered and valued.

In terms of messaging, Mambu aims to communicate directly and clearly with its consumers, emphasizing its role as a trusted partner in their digital transformation journey. By providing flexible, cloud-native solutions and enabling rapid innovation through technology, Mambu supports its customers’ growth and success.

Technology plays a pivotal role in Mambu’s day-to-day operations, enabling the company to innovate, collaborate, and deliver cutting-edge solutions to its customers. With a focus on cloud-native architecture and API-first design principles, Mambu remains at the forefront of technological advancement in the banking sector.

Mambu’s eco strategy aligns with growing consumer demand for sustainable banking practices. By leveraging its cloud-native platform to reduce carbon footprints and support green finance initiatives, Mambu enables financial institutions to align with sustainability goals while driving innovation and growth.

What is your USP

Mambu is a cloud banking platform. We enable banks, fintechs, lenders and non-financial institutions of all sizes and maturity levels to take their core banking services to the cloud. Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry to move onto modern technology and to adopt a more agile, innovative operating model. We do this by evangelising the concept of “building the new to replace the old” both directly with our customers, as well as with our partnership ecosystem.

Outdated legacy tech stacks are a burden on banks and on their end customers. The flexibility that a modern core banking engine provides is unmatched. With this technology, financial institutions can compose the types of financial products and services their customers and the market demands.

In a nutshell, Mambu can improve the speed-to-market and time-to-revenue, while enabling a lower cost-to-operate – a major barrier for customers.

What is the main problem you solve for your customers?

The Deloitte report Digital transformation hits core banking, confirms what banks already know: they have a complex decision to make on how to change. They need to be agile enough to explore and test new markets and products, customer centric enough to personalise services to compete, as well as future proof enough to navigate internal and external changes.

Mambu customers often want to innovate in tandem with market changes and customer preferences, but they lack the agility and technology to do so. Mambu is a technology-enabler. For our customers, this means we’re best placed to provide the tools they need to be agile and flexible in all aspects of their product offerings.

We’ve taken great care in building up an ecosystem of best-in-breed technology partners, so that financial institutions are not locked into specific vendors. By allowing integrations through APIs – fundamental to what we consider our composable banking framework – our customers can seamlessly design and deliver financial solutions for their customers.

What are your brand values?

The heart of our objective is to level up access to great banking experiences – for everyone, everywhere. Our technology powers that change, and our people power the technology. A few core principles guide us: be bold and embrace challenges, be customer-obsessed, be accountable for results, be curious and evolve, be one Mambu, be yourself and embrace difference. This is how we deliver and innovate for our customers.

Do your values define your decision-making process?

It’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it and how we work together. We have created a true ownership culture, which is integral to our success. We help and empower each other to make decisions that can have a lasting impact on our business, and positively influence thousands of customers and millions of their end users worldwide.

Is team culture integral to your business?

With more and more team members working remotely and across different countries, it’s no longer feasible to gather everyone in one room for a conversation. Despite this, we are all united in our efforts to deliver great work for our customers.

To create the culture we want, and cater to remote working needs, we use a tool called Natter in our company-wide meetings. This tool allows us to randomly pair people from different departments and levels within the organisation, breaking down silos and encouraging conversations – ultimately fostering a nurturing, inclusive environment. Culture is integral to every business, or at least, it should be! At Mambu we believe strongly that defining your culture from the start is a crucial step to success.

In terms of your messaging do you think you talk directly to your consumers in a clear fashion?

Distilled to its essence, a core banking system is the software used to support a bank’s most common transactions from daily banking to lending and interacts with accounting and reporting systems.

These functions don’t in themselves help financial institutions differentiate their services. However, they do help with the heavy lifting behind the scenes, so banks can focus on the products and services that do allow differentiation.

We seek to be our customers’ trusted partner on this journey. Their success is our success. As such, we align as a trusted partner to ensure our customers are successful in what they’re trying to achieve so their business grows with us.

The solution landscape is evolving fast, which means having the flexibility to use new services as new needs emerge. Our composable banking framework and API-first approach enables this, so financial institutions can innovate at pace.

What’s your take on inflation and interest rates – are you going to pass that on to your customers or let your margins take a hit and reward customer loyalty in these tougher times?

Our research shows that cloud migration can bring financial institutions a ±40% cost reduction. As the current market challenges financial services providers to move more quickly and be more flexible to shifts, moving to the cloud is a sustainable solution to spending less on key infrastructure. Instead, they can direct resources to other areas as they grow their business and focus on changing customer needs.

Another key value proposition behind cloud transformation is speed. Agility will be key to staying resilient in these times, and the speed that a cloud banking platform brings is unmatched. With a low-code, modern UI, financial institutions can launch new products and services in a matter of hours or days, compared to months or years of implementation to change or upgrade on-premise solutions. Not to mention the SaaS operating model means new features are available weekly and accessible instantly.

Is tech playing a much larger part in the day-to-day running of your company?

As a fintech, we were born in the cloud and enabling our customers to innovate with technology is what we do. We hope to bring more financial institutions along with us on this journey.

To stay competitive, it’s crucial for banks to embrace new technology. Most banks have focused on digitising their front-end systems to meet ever-changing customer demands, while their core banking continues to run on decades-old legacy systems.

By migrating their legacy systems to the cloud, banks can build agility, flexibility, and scalability into their core banking systems. This, in turn, enables them to innovate faster, speed up time-to-market, and deliver the seamless digital experiences that today’s customers expect.

What is your attitude to your competitors?

The answer here is likely to be similar across most industries, which is that healthy competition is good for innovation.

A parallel can be made with the interplay of incumbent financial institutions and new banks and fintechs players. As exciting as the new banks and fintech plays are, today’s established banks still have major assets to bring to the table like a large, loyal customer base built from years of brand recognition as well as strong balance sheets to fund innovation with less dependence on outside investment.

In many cases, incumbents are going digital through acquisition or launching their own digital banks. All this to say, both sides drive the other to become better.

What is your company’s eco strategy?

Over two thirds of consumers want their bank to become more sustainable in the future, according to our research. A further, 25% have knowingly made use of a sustainable banking product or service like sustainable credit and debit cards, green savings accounts and bonds, green mortgages and green loans.

Financial brands need to shift gears and understand how to win new customers while protecting the planet. Our cloud-native banking platform enables a 40% carbon footprint reduction when compared to on-premise computing equivalents. We are proud to be an effective enabler of green finance by supporting our customers in building offerings that keep both innovation and sustainability in mind.