From CTO to CEO: Mambu's Fernando Zandona

Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity to be here, really appreciate it. Looking forward to chatting with you.

Quite a journey, from building container services at AWS to leading a core banking provider in Europe. It was quite a journey. As you mentioned, I spent a lot of time at Microsoft, and another ten years at AWS. And I think my next obvious move would have been to find another big tech to go to, right? But an experience I had living in Seattle, in that environment with Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon, you're basically just changing the email address, but the big-tech experience is similar. The culture is very different, but similar. So I was really looking for the next big challenge I could go after, after 10 years of Amazon, or AWS. And that challenge ended up being Mambu. Well, I ended up at Mambu. And I came, as you mentioned, as a CTO. So I spent one year as CTO for Mambu, and after one year I was offered the opportunity to take over the CEO role by our board. I've been leading the company since 2023. So, quite a different experience.

Exactly, that's exactly it. Moving to Google, for example, would have been very similar. When you're at AWS, you probably know about the culture, it's heavily on delivery, on ownership and all of that. People there feel very stressed with that, and if you don't like that culture, you're out. But it's also such a bubble, because you have all the support, you have the strong culture, the talent, the infrastructure, years of experience of running that business. So I think I was looking for something that is not that, almost like the real world outside big tech. And here I am, experiencing the bigger world, the real world, driving, from a company in the Netherlands, core banking across the globe. So, quite different.

No, but compared to a big tech, it's absolutely right. It's very different, yeah.

I do not, right. So that's also quite interesting. I came from engineering, from building software, really a technical geek journey. And it's very interesting, because it opens up opportunities to talk about things differently. In a way it's a challenge, because we're talking to folks who are running banks and they expect you to understand how a bank runs, and I've been learning a lot about that from my teams. But I also brought a different aspect to it: the scalability, how to run those highly scalable services, how to build software differently, not from the mainframe point of view, but from the SaaS, cloud-based point of view. And I think that has opened up opportunities, both internally and with our prospects and customers.

Surprise, on first encounter? No, we know, or I knew, that financial services is quite a range, actually. We have the fintechs who are breaking the mould, moving faster than the more legacy, established financial institutions. And then all the way to companies who are running on their mainframes and are happy with that and don't consider changing it. We have the regulators operating on top of all of that. So it's quite a challenging, peculiar segment. So, not totally surprised, but when you experience it, when your product depends on that moving faster, when you see the reality, the bubble bursts at that point. So it's also, how to say, an opportunity. That's the opportunity.

Yeah, yes, all the time. Every day. And sometimes that fix really is technology; technology can do so much for us today. Some of those fixes are really "we can just implement this," or "you can just do that." But then, as I mentioned, there are other layers of this stack that you don't have control over. Regulation is one of them. I just came from a meeting with a central bank where we were discussing the aspects of running core banking in the cloud, on a SaaS-based approach, which is different for them. The central banks are still trying to understand what that even means. And then you put AI on top of that. So the fixing, it's not only software or technology that helps, and it helps a lot, and we're bringing that to the market, and AI is bringing that to the market, but I think the whole industry has to evolve and catch up.

Yeah, a very humbling experience. As I mentioned, I came to Mambu fully thinking I would be the CTO for the company. At no point in my career did I think, "I'm doing this because I want to be a CEO." I was happy being on the techie side. So it's very humbling to be here, very humbling to be given this opportunity, and to get the trust from the board, the investors, and the Mambuvians, as we call ourselves, to be able to lead the company. The second thing is, it's such an amazing learning opportunity to be here. I used to run a business at AWS, be responsible for a P&L, but, as I mentioned, there's so much support there that you don't fully run the business. So, lots of learning opportunities going through this process.

I believe so, because I'm able to discuss the technical aspects of the conversation with customers and prospects. There's also an opportunity for me to understand what we're building, how we're building it, and whether there are better ways I can share my experience with our engineering teams. So it's a great advantage to be able to understand how things are built, and, in some cases, even build it myself, so I can test and operate it.

Absolutely. Not as much at Mambu, I think we have very strong engineering teams that don't require me to be coding for them. I do a lot of AI evangelism internally, so that's still part of what I do, and I keep my hands on the code, looking at the code, experimenting, building prototypes myself and showing some of the teams, especially non-product engineering teams. But on my free time, I spend a lot of my free time still coding. We don't code anymore, but I'm still testing all the different models and writing my own little applications, so I can be prepared to talk and understand what's happening.

Yeah, I think there are a few things. One is, we have to cross that boundary of "no, this is bad." This is a tool, it's just a tool, a tool that, right now, you have to learn. You do not have an option. You have to learn how to use this tool. Your job has changed. Everyone's job has changed, and you have to learn how to use this tool. So we start from there, and then we start to evangelise and show. For Mambu, we did a 360 approach to adopting AI. We didn't just give licences to people, we started more top-down, with learning-and-development opportunities, with touch bases, with demo days where we show what we're building, with folks from non-product engineering showing the things they're building. It's so impressive. It's really impressive to see what people can do when they're given the opportunity. And also so impressive to see engineers go from being very sceptical to "we're so proud that now we can ship these things in a day," versus the time it was taking us before.

Yeah, so Mambu coined that, right? We coined the term "composable banking," and we also delivered composable banking first, before anyone else. And it's good to know that everyone is kind of copying the message, because it shows you've been successful with it. So we've been delivering that composability since Mambu started, and I believe it's even more important today, because of AI, and because of everything we're talking about. That you have an infrastructure for your bank that allows you to connect your agents, connect the AI, or allows us to provide those AI products to our customers, because we have the ability to easily connect, with APIs, to our core. So I think that moat continues to exist, and it's our job to continue evolving that conversation. A natural path right now is towards AI, how AI can help you run a bank, and what we can do to help you provide that.

Yeah, and it's more than just that, right? We have the distribution. We have the trust from regulators, the trust from banks and financial institutions. So all of that becomes, if you think about a moat, a moat for Mambu. And if you're starting now as a fintech, you have to find that moat as fast as possible, because, as we're saying, writing code in itself is not the moat anymore. It used to be, "this is a very complex piece of software, so we have a moat." Knowing how to write this, in itself, is not a moat anymore. So if you're starting right now, you have to look for what that moat is that you're bringing to the market that will allow you to scale.

MCP, right? We call it MCP. So, if you're not technical, I think the best way to think about it is just a connector. It's an easy way for you to connect an AI application to a source of data or functionality. So we call that MCP, and it allows that easy connection. It's a pattern, it's a product, it's a standard that everyone can use and plug into. So we have our own Mambu MCP server, and we're working with several customers who are using it and trying it, to see how they can improve their productivity inside the bank. It becomes more and more table stakes in this market.

Absolutely. For example, internally at Mambu we have several of our productivity tools MCP-enabled, so we're connecting to all of them and we have our agents connecting and talking to all these different services. In the past you'd need to go through each UI, understand it, download the data and put it on a spreadsheet. Now we can just have our agents connecting and doing that work. For the core, it's the same thing, we're enabling that functionality for our customers, so they can build things around it so much more easily. They can point their LLM at Mambu Core and ask questions about what's happening with a specific customer, what's happening with transactions, what's happening inside the core, which, a few months ago, was something you wouldn't imagine being possible.

Absolutely. And we're seeing a range of financial institutions, from those that have the ability to think this way, the skill set, the engineering capability, to say "Mambu has an MCP server, let's go and connect to it," all the way to financial institutions that just don't have that capability. So we're able to cover all of that, at the minimum, the MCP server, but we're also building the AI agents for banking. And that's the very easy, user-friendly approach, where you don't need to understand any of this, you just go there and use it. So we see that range very clearly in the industry today, where financial institutions go from being very tech-savvy to completely needing help to move forward.

Yeah, if we go all the way there, into the future, I do believe that banking will continue. We need banking as an institution. But I do believe the way you interact with banking will change completely in the next few years. And I agree that we're all looking for differentiated customisations, so why not. So even the app you run on your phone today to do banking, I believe that, in the long run, will disappear as well. We're going to have my AI agents talking to my bank, figuring out what's going on with my account, and the bank's AI agent replying to my AI agent and figuring it out. So I do believe that, in the future, all of that experience will go through AI, with a flavour of AI; maybe it's not ChatGPT, but a flavour of AI, and we'll just be natural users of that. The same way that you text someone, or send a WhatsApp, that's going to be just part of our day-to-day.

Yeah, let me say that it was not just "might as well buy another company." There was some strategy behind it.

No, but one thing I worked really hard on, and Mambu and our Mambuvians worked really hard on, was getting to a point where we were profitable and self-sufficient. We came from the era of burning cash, as anything in tech usually does, to a place where, now, we're comfortable, and the money we raised from that last round you mentioned at the start was still available to us. So: do we keep this money in the bank, or make that money work for us? The strategy was to do the latter. And then we started looking at what's around the core, and what would add value to us. Payments was a key functionality we were considering, buy or build. And we went for the buy. We found Numeral, an excellent company, moving super fast, delivering super fast, very nimble, and that was perfect for where we are, a key capability we needed, with a strong team that was delivering.

Yeah, yes, absolutely.

Yeah, I think buying gives you real time to market, and the whole thesis has to be around that. If I invest, usually buying is more expensive than building, so you need to find a way where the equation makes sense, and usually that's time to market: how fast we can move once we acquire a company. The other one is the synergies, are we better together? Can we sell more together, because we now have this functionality in place? So that was the key point of the decision to buy rather than build: we don't have the time. What I would do differently, there's a lot of learning. Interestingly, we had a conversation today, in one of the Q&A sessions I run with the company, and I think one of the learnings is really on the tactical aspects of doing the integration. Some companies have a full team just to do M&A integrations, and we did that with the existing team we have. So: how we can more quickly figure out how to integrate, the G&A functions, commercial, the engineering organisation, and what you do not integrate, because you want to keep them moving fast. So all of that was pretty good learning that I'd carry into the next acquisition.

Absolutely, yeah. We learn with each one of those.

On acquiring another company, I think, do not dismiss the integration part. It's very time-consuming, and you need to make sure you're able to do it without distracting you from the main business you have. I think that'd be the main advice.

Why they do not move? Yeah, doing a full core migration is a massive project, and we all understand that. Some CTOs have nightmares about that, banking CTOs have nightmares about that. So it's a difficult decision. Some customers decide to just, for example, run Mambu on the side and build new financial products on Mambu, instead of moving the full legacy provider into Mambu. That reduces the risk, and it's something we bring to our prospects as an opportunity, a modern core, on the side, to launch those financial products. What we're seeing a lot in the markets today is this "wait and see." Lots of financial institutions are in this wait-and-see mode, and they're missing the point that this is actually the time to move. Because if you don't move now, then it's too late. The winners are the ones that, in this moment, are making the moves. We saw that in the past, and it's going to repeat. We have some financial institutions, our customers, growing so fast, and they did that exactly when everyone was saying "this is a very risky time," but they took the bet, and now they're leveraging that opportunity.

Yeah, I'm not a bank, right? I'm not a financial institution. We say that we run hundreds of banks across the globe, we run the infrastructure of hundreds of banks across the globe, but we ourselves are not a bank. So it's quite a different approach.

Yeah, well, what I meant is: if you're the technical leader in a financial institution and you push to do a core banking migration, that is a significant decision and a significant project for those technical leaders. Some of them have gone through the process, happy to say, not with Mambu, but with other providers, and they had difficult experiences. We've seen those transformations failing over and over. And we've had opportunities to bring them in, earn their trust, and actually make it happen together with them. So we work very differently with our customers. We have very established financial institutions working with us today to do a full core migration, and enjoying the process. It's stressful, of course, but they're still enjoying the process, because we're there with them on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, we have so many opportunities in front of us, and we're pretty excited about the future. We believe our core is the right product for this new era of AI, and we're happy to help our customers leverage all that technology. But on top of that, we're building our own AI-based products that we're making available to existing and new customers. And our mission, we say our mission is to make more possible in people's lives through easy and simple access to financial services. So that's what we're doing: making it easier and easier for financial institutions to enable more powerful services for their customers. And that's a pretty good mission to have.

Talent. You have to have the right people. That is the only thing that matters, actually.

Absolutely. When I say talent, I think it's all-inclusive, you want the talent that has the growth mindset, the talent that wants to grow a business, wants to learn how to grow a business; you want that as part of the culture you have. So all of that is included in this word, "talent." And having that is so crucial. That is the foundation. We have our strategy that we present to the company and to our board, and on every slide where we talk about our strategy, we have the Mambuvians as the foundation. That is where you build the pillars of your strategy. Without that, you don't have the strategy. So we have to have the right talent to grow the business.

Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for your time and for the questions, really appreciate it. It was a really good conversation.