Get Started: agility in banking and adoption in fintech remain key pain points
mmob's Founder and CEO, Irfan Khan, recently appeared on the Get Started podcast by SkyParlour. Through an insightful interview with Kimberley Waldron, he shared mmob’s origin story and how his experience of the frustrations faced by both startups and enterprises led to founding a business that marries the two together.
mmob is an embedded finance enabler that provides a technology toolkit for API-based solutions to be embedded into apps and websites at speed. Examples of services range from credit products and insurance to open banking payments, which can be used in digital marketplaces, banking apps and more.
“Our proprietary technology we’ve been building over the past four years allows us to do the API orchestration and UI/UX to create that service fully natively to be deployed into any digital channel, anywhere in the world… so your clients can access this in as little as two hours.”
While mmob’s focus is on eliminating pain points for the technical integration of embedded finance, it really speaks to a wider business problem of reaching customers – and getting to revenue – faster.
The biggest frustration in financial services remains not being able to innovate at pace – now, it’s even more frustrating because the right solutions do exist.
“I used to run large scale technology transformation programmes for banks. I’d become quite frustrated with the pace of change,” explains Khan. “I had quite substantial technology budgets but the outcome of actually delivering on them… the change used to take years, and by the time you delivered the programmes it was actually quite limited in terms of impact down to the consumer level.
“I just didn’t feel as though I was able to demonstrate the true value proposition of where concentrated effort of technology could take us.” It was at this point Khan decided to start his first fintech, a B2C proposition which he exited five years ago.
While the fintech space has far more innovative solutions, they often don’t reach the levels of adoption to make a real change for consumers and businesses either.
As a fintech founder, was the grass greener? It was certainly faster paced, but Khan recognised there was still a key issue facing fintechs.
“The biggest pain point in the fintech ecosystem is that you do have rapid change in products and services, but creating adoption of those services is really challenging,” he explains. “There was a moment as a Founder and CEO of my first fintech where I thought, hold on a second, it doesn’t matter how amazing this product proposition is. In order to get real scale, you really need to have this adopted into different digital channels that have a large number of customers.”
Being in a unique position as a startup Founder who had also been a customer of innovative solutions within a large scale organisation, it didn’t take long for the pieces to fit together.
“You’ve got a problem statement on one side where large enterprises and financial institutions are struggling with innovation but have lots of customers, and then on the other side you’ve got this fintech ecosystem that has amazing products and services which don’t have the distribution. What if you could bring these two ecosystems together?”
mmob came about to bring these two needs of agility and scale together
mmob was born from the potential of interoperability – if these two sides of the ecosystem could work together, then innovative new products and services could seamlessly interact with large enterprises and the end users (whether consumers or those internally) would benefit immediately.
Waldron added that in her experience working with fintechs, banks and the various accelerator programmes set up to try and manage the relationship between the two, there remains frustration on both sides – even almost 15 years after what we might call the first big fintech wave. “Banks do want to partner, and they have identified their partners, they want to innovate – but by the time they bring on those partners, by the time they integrate fintech into their product offering, it’s dampened down so much that it ends up almost just being a partnership. The tech integration isn’t there.”
“Each side requires a big investment if they do it directly,” says Khan. “What if you were able to create an embeddable technology?”
This is exactly what mmob can help with – to find out more about building embeddable solutions that can be adopted by large enterprises at speed, get in touch.
