Mambu to Link Mastercard Move into Its Core Platform for Middle East Banks
The tie-up lets banks running Mambu's Intelligent Core add cross-border payments through their existing digital channels, without a multi-year build.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
Mambu will connect Mastercard Move to its Intelligent Core, giving banks in the Middle East that run on the platform a route into cross-border payments they do not have to build themselves.
Two products, one connection
Mastercard Move is the card network's collection of tools for sending money between countries. Intelligent Core is Mambu's cloud-based engine for core banking and payment processing. Joining the two means a bank inherits cross-border capability instead of assembling it in-house. Neither product is new. What is new is the wiring between them.
The alternative is slower. Correspondent relationships, currency conversion and compliance checks all have to be in place before a transfer can leave the country, and stitching that together inside a bank's own systems competes with every other item on a technology roadmap.
Core banking software holds the accounts, ledgers and transaction records that everything else sits on. Adding a product usually means building on top of that layer. Where the connection already exists inside the platform, that step goes away.
For a regional bank the appeal is easy to see. Transfers abroad are something customers ask for often, whether they are sending money to family or paying a supplier overseas. Not every institution can run that service at scale on its own. Riding an existing network costs less than building one.
Mambu and Mastercard say the link simplifies the work and shortens the time needed to launch the service.
Inside the bank's own app
The payments are meant to be offered through the digital banking services a bank already operates. Customers use the app or portal they have today. Nothing extra to download, no second set of credentials. That keeps the customer relationship with the bank rather than with a standalone remittance app.
The partnership extends a push into payments that Mambu began with its acquisition of Numeral in 2024.
Both companies point to small businesses and consumers as the users they have in mind. Demand for international payments that are clearer and simpler keeps growing, they say.
"Adding cross-border payment capabilities shouldn't require financial institutions to take on years of integration work or rethink their entire tech stack," said Fernando Zandona, chief executive at Mambu.
Pratik Khowala, Mastercard's global head of transfer solutions, said the reach of Mastercard Move and its record in moving money are what allow financial institutions to meet what customers now expect.
Reach
Mastercard says Move operates in more than 200 countries and territories and supports over 150 currencies. It reaches more than 17 billion endpoints, and it covers 95% of people worldwide who hold a bank account. Those figures describe ground a single institution would otherwise have to negotiate market by market.
A bank on Mambu's platform is not buying a new rail or a new licence. It is getting a connection to one that already spans most of the world's banked population.
