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Meet Mambu, the SaaS cloud banking platform powering financial innovators everywhere.

Mambu

SaaS cloud banking platform

Mambu culture started taking shape organically, almost unplanned, at a very early stage, when the company didn’t even exist yet. In hindsight, the foundation story - three friends with very different personalities and backgrounds but similar values, seizing an opportunity to democratise financial services while working on their masters degree - is already the archetype for what culture at Mambu means, as well as the building block for its evolution.

How culture nurtured the business at Mambu throughout the years:

It was the embodiment of the founders set of beliefs: 

Value put on culture among other pillars (e.g. technology) as a 

, talented people make one another more effective

Grew a flat, non-hierarchical organisation where 

 of work processes to elevate the employee experience

Awareness of society’s cultural shifts and willingness to champion 

 programme in order to foster company values

Today, culture permeates different areas of the business, from talent acquisition, to company meetings, through to the way feedback is shared among employees. By looking beyond employees' mere business performance, people who make Mambu a better place for everyone take centre stage and are celebrated during an awards ceremony eponymously named ‘outstanding Mambuvians’.

One of Mambu’s recommendations for all managers during the pandemic has been to not only check in more frequently with employees, but also offer more flexibility and show vulnerability to be able to bring the culture to a personal level. Next to this, a cultural ambassadorship programme was honed to help Mambuvians stay connected through organised activities.

Post pandemic, however, there will be new things to consider: what will going back to the office look like? How will offices accommodate the shifts in human interaction? In fact, the way Mambu will facilitate how people can collaborate together, is probably the company’s most culturally-relevant post-pandemic aspect. A hybrid approach with a good dose of flexibility will be crucial in this respect, and in scaling the business.

While it’s true that not all organisations have the mindset, time or resources to devote to company culture, it’s such a fundamental pillar that if values are in the right place, then companies can scale their businesses while growing a healthy culture too.

For more information about Mambu’s culture, revisit the 

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More about Mambu's culture

Is scaling the culture as important as scaling the business?

Our leadership team share their insights on how the market has changed as well as how we responded to the pandemic, what it means for the business and how we've prepared for the future. 

Ben Goldin, Chief Product & Technology Officer

Covid19 has certainly impacted life at Mambu but as we have always been a distributed company, we were able to respond to the disruption promptly while keeping our focus on driving the digital agenda and supporting our customers. With more spinoffs and fintechs entering the sector, the strategy was to embrace the opportunity for collaboration with other market players and our ecosystem partners. 

Elliott Limb

We continued to invest in building our teams, welcomed two hundred new Mambuvians and opened a new engineering hub in Vilnius, Lithuania. The challenge to work remotely has pushed us to think about new methods of collaboration and onboarding, new ways to foster our culture and use technology to interact with our customers.

In spite of what was happening all around the world, being cloud native and agile has enabled us to win over dozens of new customers globally, some being our largest deals to date.

Eugene Danilkis

Back in March and April, that realisation pushed us to move faster and to reshuffle company priorities to quickly develop and roll out new lending features and capabilities. The aim was to help our customers help their customers deal with the financial hit of the pandemic.

Ben Goldin

We further increased payment capabilities, credit card features and set up a direct debit function. The pandemic has expedited the market changes that were bound to take place. The financial arena called for innovation and agility, and Mambu was in the right position to answer that call.

Although scaling the business will remain a priority, we’ll also focus on getting more ‘

’ - closer to the regional customers to better understand their reality and challenges. With a foot on the accelerator, Mambu expects to welcome an additional two hundred employees in 2021 so a great deal of effort will also go into protecting the robust company culture.

The expectation is that financial services are becoming more embedded into the cross-industry digital journeys. Our goal for 2021 is to keep the momentum going.

One year in review Mambu 2020

Our year in review: Mambu in 2020 

Mambuvians are challenged to think about a problem/idea and a way of addressing it. ShipIT participants promote the idea and find their perfect team (5-7 members) for the implementation phase. The event unleashes people’s creative energy more than day-to-day operations. The only rule is that all participants must improve the Mambu product and its ecosystem — in any way they see fit.


was a special one because for the very first time ShipIT was a  100% online event. Mambuvians ventured into a virtual approach while remaining connected, enjoying the dedicated time for creativity and innovation capacity. This edition was also unique because of its global set-up, connecting locations such as Iasi, Vilnius, Amsterdam, Miami, Singapore, Berlin, Sydney and Chile, demonstrating that ShipIT hackathon can be done truly remotely. In the end, ShipIT 2020 gathered 154 Mambuvians across 8 locations worldwide, who submitted 23 ideas involving microservices, devops, agile, business metrics and more.
The event had 3 phases:

Mambuvians were encouraged to come up with ideas, a way for addressing them and set up a team to implement it.

After they did some thinking about the problem, the teams started to build their solutions.

 Finally, it was time to showcase the work, in a massive conference-like event, boast a little and enjoy the compliments. The most important takeaway from this stage is the knowledge sharing that teams do between each other.

As people learned organically from each other, they became better equipped to solve other teams’ problems and created stronger bonds.


“Do you know the saying “Monkey see, monkey do”? Well, that’s exactly one of the key benefits from ShipIT: by getting together and working in groups, we foster social learning, that is, we learn by observing what others do and imitating or modelling that behaviour. Social learning is also a great source of motivation and I saw it in my group because the more findings and ideas team members brought to the table, the more it inspired the rest to keep on investigating and exploring new possibilities.” 

Usable ideas, product features and prototypes


What we have been impressed by most is how many usable ideas, prototypes, and product features emerged at the end of this ShipIT.


"It is incredible to see how much engineers can achieve given the full autonomy and focus in just three days. Most of the initiatives explored in the ShipIT will have a fundamentally positive impact on our internal efficiency, the way of working as well as the particular capabilities offered to our customers.” 

Ben Goldin, Chief Technology and Product Officer

Creating space for people to play with ideas and have fun together wakes up that curious part of our brain that was most active when we were children.


“This is my first edition of ShipIT, therefore I was very thrilled and curious about it. I must admit it exceeded my expectations. It came up as a positive surprise because the ideas, the quality of the presentations and the work of all the teams were amazing. The 7th edition of ShipIT was a wonderful experience which showed me how much can be achieved in this organisation during a short period of time with a clear focus on something. What I really appreciated is the fact that it was not a typical hackathon where you see few leader teams shine and the others remain in the background. In our ShipIT experience, it was quite the opposite: the majority of the team kept the bar high!” 

Andrius Bagdonavicius, Platform & Reliability Engineer Champion

Finally, the team spirit we experienced during this event has been unparalleled. It strengthened the relationships and confirmed once again to all Mambuvians what a cool bunch of people they are.


“Our team members were spread across Iasi, Vilnius and Amsterdam. Driven by the same problems, we were able to focus and collaboratively identify the best ideas that solve major pain points. Moreover, the collaborative and open-minded approach allowed us to discover various hidden talents in the team. This again proves how important it is to have an open-minded environment which is essential for creating synergy and building a team spirit that flourishes.” 

Ignas Ašmontas, Service Reliability Engineer

A short, intense plunge that allows our Mambuvians to experience a creative disruption in an electric, vibrant way.


“ShipIT! - the 7th edition! Wow, time flies so fast... I recall when we had our first edition and the ideas were about misc small improvements :) During these 7 years, Mambu’s development team grew so strong that right now the ideas are at an amazingly high level of impact. It’s clear that we invested a lot of energy into encouraging everybody to be bold and to constantly apply innovation into our daily lives in order to make them much better. I can clearly see the benefit for our customers and for the entire Mmabu team if all of this year’s ideas would be implemented!” 

With the still-fresh memory of what happened this year we already started working on concrete plans into handling the key aspects we’d learned and tried in this year’s edition. We are excited to start implementing some concrete MVPs as soon as possible.
Seeing this project growing so beautifully every year, makes us wonder what the next edition will look like and so on. There is no doubt that the ShipIT journey bears the imprint of an unbridled desire to become better.

More on Engineering

ShipIT legacy to Mambu’s engineering culture

Increased diversity - greater performance.

Realising the business benefits of a diverse workforce, most organisations promote diversity. No doubt, there's a business case for workplace diversity and gender parity as having a balance of gender or ethnicity, for example, does not simply improve a company’s reputation. Companies have discovered that by supporting a diverse and inclusive environment they are gaining benefits that go beyond the optics.

Recently, a study from the European Institute for Gender Equality has reported that getting more women into STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) will have a positive impact on EU’s economic growth. The institute estimated that it could lead to an additional 1.2 million jobs, which would increase the EU GDP per capita by 0.7–0.9 per cent in 2030 and by 2.2–3.0 per cent in 2050. Businesses with a diverse workforce 

, simply because different perspectives equal better discussions, and offer more creative solutions. 

People with different backgrounds and characteristics are much more likely to have a variety of different skills and experiences, which, in turn, gives them different perspectives. Mixed teams are more creative, innovative, 

, and make better decisions, since, once again, their skill set and expertise offer more diverse solutions.


Diversity isn’t just a numbers game. But we have to start somewhere.

In our interconnected world, diversity is about more than just gender, race and ethnicity. It is also about the inclusion of employees of various religious and political beliefs, disabilities, cultures, sexual orientation, and socio-economic backgrounds. However, we have to start somewhere and gender equality is still a priority, globally and in our workplaces.

As a rule, our workplaces mirror our societies and lives outside work. Understandably, businesses that have the transformative power to provide a more open, and inclusive society, have made gender parity a priority. For instance, the gender ratio in tech at 

 is 25% (+1,9 points since 2018), while at 

 it’s 23% (1.4 point increase), both have made diversity a strategic objective.

In their own words

We asked Mambuvians to share with us their thoughts on diversity not only in their work environment but in the industry as a whole. See what they have to say:

Diversity in my work environment means being immersed in an environment that welcomes and respects people of varying gender, age, religions, cultures, sexual orientations, abilities and perspectives. At Mambu I am surrounded by incredibly smart, curious people from diverse backgrounds with a wealth of experiences, knowledge and perspectives. As a company, we know where we want to go, and what makes us unique is asking for, valuing and appreciating diverse perspectives from our people, to shape how we are going to get there.

When in a business environment we talk about diversity I always think of diversity in a broader sense - to me it is not just about gender. It is about ethnicity, functional background, education, and much more. Companies with a global footprint must be aware that they must solve problems and needs of a diversified and complex society, which they only can do by embracing diversity.

When it comes to gender diversity in sales or fintech/banking industry, clearly the environment is predominantly male. At the same time I know that both industries have many initiatives in place to attract more women, but that is just one side of it. I believe that it also has a lot to do with having the courage to simply try and see if you have the right skill set.

To me, diversity is not about numbers, parity, statistics or board representations. It is about space. Giving space to others, allowing them to have a voice and to be their genuine selves. Discrimination is not the opposite of diversity - domination is. Domination makes people assume positions and forces others to conform.

Embracing diversity is an active effort of breaking that dominance apart. If I feel that my behaviour may affect colleagues of different gender, sexuality or ethnicity, I try to adjust my behaviour to create a free space for everyone. Embracing diversity requires sensitivity and empathy, and the constant reappraisal of our own convictions.

More on Trends

Getting diversity right

Wondering how Mambu can help you get products to market faster, improve your business agility and elevate your customer experience?

We have all that covered in our live demo session. Join us as we walk through the Mambu platform, tour the partner ecosystem and show you why Mambu is the only true SaaS platform trusted by hundreds of financial businesses around the world.

Join us as we walk through the Mambu platform, tour the partner ecosystem and we can show you why Mambu is the only true SaaS platform trusted by hundreds of financial businesses around the world.