Accelerating pan-African growth
Platcorp Holdings Limited, a major microfinance funder in Africa, strategically adopted Mambu's cloud platform, enabling rapid greenfield launch and significant automation that saves 100,000 man-hours annually while fueling growth across six markets.
- African markets
- man hours saved yearly
- million loans disbursed
PLATCORP
About the customer
Founded in 2003, Platcorp Holdings Limited (Platcorp) is an impact finance investment management holding company that primarily invests in non-banking lending subsidiaries. With operational entities in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Zambia, Platcorp employs over 10,000 people, including sales representatives, and maintains an active client database of more than 650,000 clients.
With a strong focus on fintech solutions and a deliberate emphasis on sustainability, the Group provides a variety of impact finance products and related services, from business and MSME financing to tailored insurance offerings.
The challenge
Shedding legacy, expanding into new markets
By 2014, Platcorp's ambition to expand across Africa and improve financial access was hampered by inflexible legacy systems hindering efficient growth and automation. To address this, they launched Premier Credit in just 2 weeks on Mambu's agile cloud platform, demonstrating significant IT cost reduction and efficiency gains.
This success underscored the critical need to standardise all of the group's entities on Mambu's API-enabled platform to overcome legacy bottlenecks, manual processes, and scalability issues that restricted geographic expansion and seamless customer service.
“The high-cost and inflexibility of our legacy system was creating a roadblock to expansion. We wanted to harness the cloud, to transform our core business, to enhance our portfolio and make entry into new territories faster and more commercially viable. We saw that it was possible on Mambu, and so we decided to migrate.”
- Simon de la Rey, COO at Platcorp Holdings
The solution
Rapid, multi-country migration to the cloud
Recognising Mambu's capability to enable a seamless digital transformation and integrate its diverse country and business operations, all underpinned by the robust infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Platcorp undertook 5 separate migrations across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Platcorp's team developed custom screens for efficient bulk postings and payments processing, and also implemented customer statements with automated payoff balance calculations and direct repayment initiation through bank APIs. This strategic migration aimed to standardise all platforms on Mambu's composable platform, a process that was executed rapidly and with minimal disruption thanks to Mambu's support.
The result
Efficiency, growth and better customer experience
By implementing Mambu's composable architecture, Platcorp achieved significant reduction in turnaround time from loan application to disbursement, saving approximately 100,000 man-hours annually through automated processes and systems. Through Mambu's flexible API-driven architecture, Platcorp can create new innovative products and services, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
Since switching to Mambu in 2017, Platcorp has fast-tracked growth in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and successfully launched in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zambia. Mambu is now the single source of truth across the business strengthening Platcorp's competitive edge and accelerated financial inclusion across East and Southern Africa.
“Mambu gave us a lean-machine infrastructure from which to scale quickly and keep operational costs down. This makes entry-models more sustainable and accelerates ROI. Without doubt, Mambu has strengthened our competitive edge.”
- Simon de la Rey, COO at Platcorp Holdings
Build your future on a cloud-native foundation
Explore how Mambu's modern, cloud-native core enables ambitious financial institutions like Platcorp, to build innovative businesses with rapid deployment and seamless automation.
