League Data is a cooperative FinTech with a mission to help its customers— 37 credit unions in Canada’s 4 Atlantic provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island)—adapt to an evolving market through sustainable innovation, leadership, and support.

The company provides chief information officer (CIO) services to 37 member credit unions that operate a total of 130 branches providing financial services to 320,000 members.

Credit unions are a form of member-owned cooperative financial institution, usually operating locally or regionally, and provide day-to-day banking services to about 6 million Canadians. Because they are much smaller than Canada’s national banks, credit unions face a challenge building the infrastructure needed to provide services comparable to the large banks.

League Data was established in 1975 as an aggregator of services, providing better buying power and giving the credit unions it serves a united voice and access to products and services they could not easily afford on their own. In turn, this increases buying power and gives the group a stronger voice.

League Data received news that its core banking software, an outsourced legacy system running on mainframe hardware, was going to reach end of life in a few years. This had the potential to disrupt operations for the 37 credit unions that operate across Canada’s 4 Atlantic provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island—because League Data provided banking infrastructure to those credit unions using that legacy software.

League Data began evaluating solution providers. It was looking for a company that would fulfil core functions but would also enable League Data to customise features, because each of its credit union customers needed a system that fitted its specific product offerings. It was also important that the solution could be customised to meet Canadian financial regulations and evolve as new regulations and financial products and services became available.

League Data anticipated that the coming years would require more than a business-as-usual approach. It expected open banking—the requirement for financial services providers to support interoperability with FinTech startups and competing incumbents—to come to Canada. It saw a need to collaborate with FinTechs, modernize payments, and keep up with credit union members’ evolving expectations for a rich digital experience.

Mambu won League Data’s attention because it matched the company’s taste for innovation.

Mambu’s SaaS banking products are built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which meant the move to a safe, secure cloud infrastructure was part of the overall modernization and migration for League Data. “In addition to Mambu’s core banking, we needed to be able to integrate a range of tools and applications from more than 20 partners,” says Wendy Spears, digital banking program manager at League Data. “AWS has great flexibility, a ton of tools, and excellent support for APIs. Even getting certification for our new system was much easier because of the documentation, the robust security, and the privacy controls that come with AWS.”

League Data has been using Mulesoft, an API platform that Griffin considers core to the technology modernization. “It has allowed us to create a more robust API catalog that gives us some ecosystem autonomy,” he says. “If we want to deal with different partners, we have the ability. It connects to Mambu and runs on AWS, has a very reliable track record, and is scalable.”

Because Mambu’s core banking solution is API friendly, League Data has been able to incorporate products and services from AWS and other vendors and can also develop its own applications.

In addition to Mambu, key AWS services used include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service that means Mambu will be able to scale as the organization grows, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for resizable compute power. It also uses Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) to manage Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations, making it easier for developers and DevOps managers to run Apache Kafka applications and Apache Kafka Connect connectors on AWS; and Amazon OpenSearch Service, which allows League Data to run search workloads simply without the hassle of configuring, managing, and scaling OpenSearch clusters.

Less than 3 years after League Data received the end-of-life warning, it had implemented a new core banking system with Mambu and migrated the majority of its operations to the cloud. It also successfully migrated its first customer, Brunswick Credit Union, to the new platform.

In the following year, more than 35 credit unions were migrated to the new system. League Data works with the credit unions to help them prepare for migration and, after the preparation is complete, League Data can do the actual cutover to the new system in less than 72 hours with no disruption to services.

League Data is now positioned for future challenges and opportunities that will come to Canada’s financial services industry, thanks to its collaboration with Mambu and AWS. The ecosystem they have built features components from more than 20 partners and supports 37 credit unions.