Google Cloud powered core banking innovation: Mambu

Google Cloud global partnership with Mambu

When the founders started Mambu in 2011 with the intention of introducing the most cutting-edge digital technology to the banking and finance industries. Particularly the banking sector is one with a long history of outdated technologies. Therefore, in just the first two years, Mambu was adopted by 100 microfinance companies in 26 countries.

Since then, financial services organizations (FSIs) have been more accepting of upgrading core banking services utilizing composable, cloud technology. We currently provide services to top tier banks, fintech startups, and other financial institutions on six continents, assisting them in providing dependable, flexible, and personalized banking products and services to their clients.

Our collaboration with Google Cloud has been one of the key factors in our ability to scale the Mambu composable banking platform globally and at our present rate. The choice to use Google Cloud was made for a number of reasons.

• 1. Openness and flexibility: Many FSIs utilize hybrid and multicloud technology stacks because they may still be migrating from outdated systems or because their data residency policies need them to use several clouds across various geographies. Wherever a customer is in their cloud journey, Mambu joins them there.
  • We advocate for interoperability without vendor entanglement. Mambu decided to evolve our platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) due to the benefits of scalability and the requirement for openness. Many clients utilize open-source Kubernetes because it may facilitate integration, accelerate time to market, and cut down on development. Furthermore, the Google Cloud open cloud strategy aligns with the principles of our business.
• 2. Data residency and security: Security is not simply front of mind for clients in highly regulated finance industry. It is also the most important necessity. In addition to its safe architecture, external audit certifications, and encryption, Google Cloud’s extensive network of regions has allowed us to grow into new nations and provide our services to banks that must adhere to national data residency laws.
  • For instance, we have been able to support Bank Jago in Indonesia as it expands financial inclusion for the unbanked in that nation thanks to Google Cloud’s Jakarta Cloud Region.
• 3. Accessibility: Even when there is a service disruption, banks must continue to provide essential financial services like collecting deposits and serving cash. A perfect redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery system was required from our cloud partner.

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The Mambu platform employs GKE as well as a number of other Google Cloud services, including Cloud Armor, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud VPN, Cloud Memorystore, and Google Cloud Operations, for particular purposes.

Our decision to work with Google Cloud was also influenced by the company’s extensive ecosystem and dedication to innovation. We are halfway through a three year process to update our own technological stack to satisfy client expectations.

Utilizing Google Cloud to create a roadmap

Our clients require a core financial technology platform that they can expand on as they launch new services based on cutting-edge technological innovations. Mambu needs a cloud partner that can support and scale with our expansion if it is to be that platform. Despite the fact that we first developed our cloud architecture using GKE and Compute Engine (along with a few other Google Cloud services), we are now looking to a serverless future where we can scale more quickly and use managed services inside Google Cloud and its partner ecosystem to concentrate on our core offers.

Here are a few examples of the modernization and customer driven innovations we’re working on right now:

• More workloads in GKE: Our cloud transformation is ongoing, much like that of many other businesses. Despite the fact that a big portion of our code base is in GKE, we’re still breaking up some larger pieces of code into microservices to boost agility and velocity.
  • This allows us to make regular modifications to specific parts of our platform without affecting the platform as a whole. GKE continues to be a natural fit and is the industry leader for orchestrating microservices at scale.
• Native BigQuery integration: The platform’s Mambu users gather a ton of data that can be used for analytics, customization, and other use cases. In order to help customers make better use of their priceless data, we intend to develop a smooth integration for transferring core banking data from Mambu into BigQuery.
• CloudSQL vs. self-managed MySQL:We are almost finished moving from our own MySQL instances to managed Cloud SQL databases, which will create new options to build customer centric solutions like BigQuery integration.
• Mambu is benefiting from a serverless future with Cloud Run: Compute Engine because it gives it the freedom to select the virtual machines that best match its needs for performance and cost. We believe the elastic scalability of a serverless architecture built on Cloud Run will get us there and are exploring adopting serverless in the future as we seek even more time and cost efficiencies.
  • This would enable us to fire up containers to match the high transaction per second needs of our customers, spin them down when not required, and just charge for usage. It would also abstract infrastructure for easier management. Additionally, it would increase security because there would be no need for updates or fixes because new instances would always be isolated and untried.

These are only a few instances of how we hope to use Google Cloud services to streamline the way we manage our tech stack and further improve security, scalability, and speed. We’re also looking into a number of other concepts, like leveraging Dataproc and Datastream to meet the unique data requirements of Islamic banking, Cloud Functions to allow users to execute their own Mambu searches, and AI enabled capabilities.

Our goal at Mambu is to enable our customers to easily provide excellent modern finance experiences to everyone on the planet. We have the opportunity to join a new market each time Google Cloud creates a new data center. We gain time to develop new strategies for delivering customer centric banking solutions each time we switch to a managed service that is brand-new to us via the Google Cloud Marketplace. We therefore anticipate maintaining our relationship with Google Cloud for a very long time.

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