Flowe's strategic shift to a Payments-as-a-Service model, powered by Mambu
In 2023, Italian challenger bank Flowe pivoted to become a Payments-as-a-Service provider. Within 6 months, leveraging Mambu's composable core banking platform, Flowe now offers white-labeled payment solutions and embedded finance capabilities to businesses and financial institutions.
- launch as a digital bank
- strategic pivot to a Payments-as-a-Services provider
- months to build Payments-as-a-Service offering
FLOWE
About the customer
In 2020, Italian incumbent and financial leader Banca Mediolanum launched Flowe, a challenger bank with the ambition of redefining the banking experience through digital, sustainable, and user-friendly solutions.
Today, recognising the growing opportunity of embedded finance, Flowe offers its market-proven formula and payment expertise to support businesses with reliable, flexible, and innovative solutions.
Through white-labeled payment solutions, Flowe supports businesses and financial institutions to integrate embedded finance, payments and value added services into their business models and implement customisable, scalable, and secure payment and collection solutions.
The opportunity
From electronic money institution to a trusted technology partner
Flowe made a remarkable entrance into the digital payments landscape in 2020. Within just six months, their offering for individuals grew to over 700,000 accounts, handling up to 18,000 transactions daily and earning widespread recognition.
Fast forward to 2024, building on its established strength as an electronic money institution (EMI), Flowe identified the immense potential of embedded finance.
They saw a clear path to help both financial and non-financial institutions integrate payment capabilities and services into their digital ecosystems. However, their existing provider couldn’t support this strategic shift. To build a solid, scalable foundation to support their vision, Flowe opted to move away from a single, monolithic system to a composable architecture built on true SaaS partners. This new approach allows Flowe to build a robust foundation by bringing together an ecosystem of top-tier partners.
“Pivoting from retail banking player to a Payments-as-a-Service provider was a defining moment for Flowe, where we realised how much more nimble, lean and scalable we needed to be. The opportunity was huge but we needed partners to easily integrate and compose in products and solutions without reinventing the wheel each time. Mambu seamlessly fit in our vision and enabled a quick and lean transformation.”
- Marco Segato, CTO, Flowe
The solution
Building a one-stop-shop model
Instead of worrying about maintaining legacy systems, change request after change request, with Mambu, Flowe now offers a platform for clients to focus on crafting exceptional payment experiences, while ensuring total compliance with regulatory changes.
As the core banking and payments provider of choice, Mambu underpins Flowe's technological foundation with its API-first, cloud native infrastructure. The Tech-as-a-Service and BaaS provider leverages Mambu’s deposit engine, a robust SEPA gateway and payments hub for automated, real-time processing from initiation to reconciliation.
Flowe will also rely on Mambu’s Verification of Payee solution to ensure full compliance with European regulations for its own infrastructure as well as clients’.
Flowe can now support a wide range of organisations, including Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs), Payment Institutions (PIs), Banks, and Non-Financial Institutions, facilitating the creation of robust financial offerings–—from card issuing and digital wallets to payment accounts and more.
“We felt the need to partner with fellows product oriented companies, that were more than happy to let Flowe drive the overall market solution exposing API first integration capabilities at their core. With Mambu we aim to bring our joint product vision to new heights accelerating both companies growth and our customers business and sustainability success.”
- Marco Segato, CTO, Flowe
The result
Achieving swift market entry and sustainable growth
Mambu’s proven core banking technology and global track record, coupled with Flowe’s deep engineering capabilities, has allowed Flowe to build a composable ecosystem of over 4 best-of-breed partners.
They went to market with their offering within 6 months from the beginning of the project and are already seeing significant traction.
Flowe is now authorised to operate by the Banca d'Italia and helps its clients alleviate the complexity of building new financial offerings through:
- A Payments-as-a-service (PaaS) model allowing banks and payment institutions to outsource their payment infrastructure and operations.
- Embedded finance plug-and-play solutions to non-financial institutions such as retailers, marketplaces, and tech startups, enabling embedded payment services directly into their digital platforms.
- Value added services, ranging from sustainability, loyalty development services, and more.
Build the next big thing in payments
Looking to outsource your payment infrastructure and operations or embed payment services directly into your offering? See what Mambu and Flowe can do for you.
