The Nordic banking market is renowned for its high level of digital maturity. However, the same maturity has led to a sense of complacency, leading to solutions that struggle to compete with more agile fintechs, says Jorno Levels, Account Executive at Mambu.
NFM caught up with Jorno Levels to discuss Mambu’s focus for the Nordics and its plans for 2025.
NFM: Tell us about Mambu.
Jorno Levels: Mambu is the first cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) core banking platform. We started out in 2011 in Africa. In two years, 100 organizations in 26 countries adopted our engine. Today, our cloud banking platform helps over 260 customers provide lending, deposits, payments, and many other solutions to 114 million end users in over 65 countries.
What makes Mambu’s composable banking model unique?
Our composable banking model ensures complete flexibility, allowing you to integrate best-of-breed solutions around the core and unlock unlimited innovation.
In addition, our “composable bank-in-a-box” model simplifies the process by having a single System Integrator (SI) manage the entire contract. The SI will recommend, integrate, and manage best-of-breed solutions around a core like Mambu, reducing the complexity of managing multiple technology contracts. This approach is created with scale, agility, ease-of-use, and speed in mind and offers more flexibility than an end-to-end (E2E) modular banking model while providing a streamlined, unified experience.
We see this model becoming more and more common, particularly in the Nordics where the demand for localized solutions is high.
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What is Mambu’s unique offering for the Nordic ecosystem?
The transformation of the Nordic financial landscape is driven by fintech innovation. And innovation means collaboration. Composable banking is a good example of this; it inherently depends on the integration of multiple fintech offerings via modern APIs. Mambu is positioned at the core of this ecosystem. While we provide the foundational architecture—a composable and configurable core banking platform—we believe that true transformation cannot go without collaboration. Our extensive ecosystem of partners, including fintech technology providers, SIs, and consulting firms, is key to delivering comprehensive solutions.
Mambu’s role in this transformation is to offer a viable and compelling alternative to traditional, often localized, banking solutions in the Nordics. We enable financial institutions to choose a delivery model that fits their needs best. Whether it’s our “composable bank-in-a-box” solution for seamless, managed transformations or our “headless” core banking platform designed for tech-savvy teams seeking flexibility and extensibility, Mambu empowers Nordic financial institutions to innovate, scale, and adapt with ease.
What are Mambu’s priorities for 2025?
A top priority is strengthening our collaboration with Nordic strategic partners. Together, we will continue investing in localizing the Mambu solution and enhancing our offering.
The appointment of Ivneet Kaur as our new Chief Product and Technology Officer will help us achieve that even faster. With over 20 years of expertise in cloud infrastructure, AI, and product/platform engineering, Ivneet will drive Mambu’s technology strategy and innovation.
Speaking of innovation, Mambu’s recent acquisition of Numeral, a payment fintech company, underscores just that. With Numeral we are able to provide even better payment solutions that are seamlessly integrated into Mambu’s cloud banking platform.
This translated into a major milestone: the partnership with a leading Swedish retail bank to fully transform and migrate their business onto Mambu. After an extensive evaluation process, the bank concluded that Mambu’s cloud banking platform aligns perfectly with its ambitions, and is compliant across the Nordic market.