Sustainable Growth and Building Strategic Capability in Digital Transformation

At The Fintech Show, the conversation surrounding digital transformation highlighted that true success for modern financial institutions is not defined by sudden, short-term spikes in deposits, but by long-term, sustainable growth. Karishma Jaycee, Customer Success Manager at Mambu, explained that the core banking provider focuses on aligning its technology directly with each client’s specific business strategy. By acting as an ultra-invisible, powerful core banking layer, Mambu handles the infrastructure heavy lifting through its composable, API-first architecture. This allows forward-thinking institutions like Paragon Bank to move away from legacy constraints, adapt to rapidly changing consumer demands, and obsess over delivering value to their end customers.

For Paragon Bank, the journey toward modernization began with a deliberate, step-by-step approach. Derek Sprawling, Savings Director at Paragon Bank, noted that the first milestone was choosing Mambu to power the bank’s deposit aggregators franchise. Because this initial environment was relatively low-volume, it allowed the bank to learn the platform and deploy the software effectively. This early foundation proved invaluable as the bank began to recognize a market opportunity for its greenfield project, “Spring”. When building Spring, a key milestone arrived during the friends and family launch phase. Sprawling highlighted that educating personal networks on the product’s benefits and receiving real-life, personal feedback served as the ultimate validation that their upfront customer insight work perfectly matched market expectations.

Adopting a composable, API-led architecture has significantly expanded Paragon’s strategic options, giving the bank the flexibility to enhance existing products or smoothly transition into new business adjacencies. Imogen Gurney, Group Transformation Director at Paragon Bank, emphasized that the ultimate benefit of this setup is a dramatic improvement in speed to market. This architecture frees the bank from the old days of being locked into monolithic, single-vendor frameworks. This technical agility provides the executive team with the hard data and choices necessary to build compelling business cases for stakeholders and the board, instilling deep institutional confidence in their ability to execute successfully.

However, unseating traditional architecture is as much an operational challenge as it is a technological one. Gurney discussed the realities of transforming an organization with 40 years of established legacy architecture. Over decades, financial institutions accumulate numerous ingrained processes, customs, and practices around their core systems. The true task of transformation from within involves unpicking these complex legacy layers to ensure that modern systems are fully accepted, sustainable, and supported by the broader business. Ultimately, this multi-year journey has built an entirely new strategic capability for Paragon Bank, equipping their internal workforce with modern technical skills that did not exist inside the institution 18 months prior—fundamentally establishing a new norm for future growth.

https://mambu.com/en/customer/paragon-bank?utm_campaign=Deposits&Savings&utm_source=FFNews&utm_medium=paid_media&utm_content=interview

Key Highlights from the Fintech Show:

• Prioritising Sustainable Growth: Jaycee explains why true banking success lies in building a flexible foundation for sustainable growth rather than chasing short-term deposit spikes.

• The Invisible Banking Layer: How Mambu’s composable, API-first core architecture does the heavy lifting in the background so banks can focus entirely on customer experience.

• A Staged Deployment Strategy: Sprawling highlights Paragon’s strategic choice to test the core software in a low-volume environment before scaling to major digital products like Spring.

• Validating with Human Insight: Why the personal stories shared during the friends and family launch phase provided the ultimate proof of concept for the product’s design.

• Unpicking 40 Years of Legacy: Gurney outlines the critical need to re-engineer decades of internal habits, processes, and corporate practices to achieve true digital modernization.

• Building New Internal Capabilities: How the digital transformation journey has successfully upskilled the bank’s internal workforce, creating a new operational norm for future development.

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