When our founders began Mambu in 2011, their goal was to bring the latest digital technologies to the banking and finance world. Banking, in particular, is an industry built on decades of deep legacy technology. So initially, Mambu was embraced by microfinance — 100 organizations in 26 countries in just the first two years. 

Since then, acceptance of modernizing core banking services by using composable, cloud technologies has grown across financial services institutions (FSIs). We now service top-tier banks, fintech startups, and other finance organizations across six continents, helping them deliver flexible, personalized, customer-centric banking products and services that their customers can depend upon.

One of the main reasons we’ve been able to scale the Mambu composable banking platform across the globe and at our current pace is our partnership with Google Cloud. The decision to move forward with Google Cloud happened for several reasons.

1. Flexibility and openness. Many FSIs are on hybrid and multicloud technology stacks, as they may still be transitioning from legacy systems, or have data residency requirements that have led them to use different clouds in different regions. Mambu meets customers wherever they are in their cloud journeys. We support interoperability without vendor lock-in. This need for openness, as well as the scalability benefits, led Mambu to evolve our platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Many customers use open-source Kubernetes because, this common foundation can help streamline integration, speed up time to market, and reduce development. Just as important, the Google Cloud open cloud approach matches our company values. 

2. Security and data residency. For customers in highly regulated finance industries, security isn’t just top of mind,  it’s the No. 1 requirement. In addition to Google Cloud’s secure infrastructure, external audit certifications, and encryption, its wide array of regions has allowed us to expand into more countries, where we serve banks that must meet local data residency requirements. For example, Google Cloud’s Jakarta Cloud Region, has allowed us to support Bank Jago in Indonesia as it brings more financial inclusion to the unbanked in that country.

3. Availability. It’s critical for banks to maintain basic financial functionality, like accepting deposits and serving cash, even amid a service disruption. We needed a cloud partner with impeccable redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery capabilities.

In addition to GKE, the Mambu platform uses several other Google Cloud services for specific functions, including Cloud Armor, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud VPN, Cloud Memorystore, and Google Cloud Operations.

Another important reason we chose to partner with Google Cloud was its expansive ecosystem and commitment to innovation. We are midway into a three-year journey to modernize our own technology stack to meet customer needs.

Building a roadmap with Google Cloud

Our customers need a core banking technology platform that will grow with them as they bring to market innovative services built on the latest technology advances. For Mambu to be that platform, we need a cloud partner that supports and scales with our growth. While we originally built our cloud architecture on GKE and Compute Engine (among a few other Google Cloud services), we’re now looking to a serverless future where we can scale more easily and leverage managed services within Google Cloud and its partner ecosystem to focus on our core offerings. 

These are just some of the modernization and customer-led innovations that we’re cooking up: 

• More workloads in GKE: Like many companies, our cloud transformation is a work in progress. While much of our codebase is in GKE, we’re continuing to break up some larger pieces of code into microservices to increase agility and velocity, enabling us to make consistent updates to discrete areas of our platform without affecting the whole. GKE is the leader for orchestrating microservices at scale and continues to be a natural fit.
• Native BigQuery integration: Mambu customers collect a tremendous amount of data within the platform that can be used for analytics, personalization, and other use cases. We’re planning to create a seamless integration for feeding core banking data from Mambu into BigQuery so that customers can better leverage their valuable data.
• CloudSQL vs. self-managed MySQL: We have almost completed migrating from our own MySQL instances to managed Cloud SQL databases, which will open up new opportunities to implement customer-centric solutions such as BigQuery integration.
• A serverless future with Cloud Run: Compute Engine is working well for Mambu, providing the flexibility to choose the virtual machines that best balance performance and cost needs. As we seek even more time and cost efficiencies, we believe the elastic scalability of a serverless architecture built on Cloud Run will get us there, and we’re considering going serverless in the future. Doing so would abstract infrastructure for simpler management, while allowing us to fire up containers to meet our customers’ high transactions-per-second needs, spin them down when not needed, and pay only when they run. It would also boost security: Without long-running compute, there are no patches or fixes, and each new instance is isolated and fresh by default.

These are just a handful of examples of the ways we want to best leverage Google Cloud services to simplify how we manage our tech stack, as well as continue to bolster security, scalability, and performance. There are many other ideas we’re exploring: using Dataproc and Datastream to support the specific data needs of Islamic banking, Cloud Functions so that customers can run their own queries against Mambu, and AI-enabled features. 

At Mambu, our mission is to empower our customers to deliver great modern financial experiences easily to everyone around the world. Every time Google Cloud opens a new data center, we can enter a new market. Every time we move to a new-to-us managed service via the Google Cloud Marketplace, we free up time to build new ways to deliver customer-centric banking solutions. And so, we look forward to continuing this partnership with Google Cloud well into the future.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry was facing disruption. Consumers have come to expect personalized and seamless experiences at every point in their relationship with a brand. Additionally, consumers are expecting CPG brands to meet rising standards for sustainability, social responsibility, and transparency. Business models are shifting as well. Direct-to-consumer and subscription models have been gaining ground on traditional business models. Add in the CPG industry’s ever-present pressure for wider profit margins and the effects of the global pandemic, and you get a perfect storm of disruption. 

Leading CPG companies are responding to these changes by capitalizing on the potential of emerging technologies and leveraging the power of the cloud to create digital enterprises. In doing so, they can unlock value through reduced operational costs, faster innovation, improved marketing ROI, and greater transparency and sustainability—among other benefits. For businesses that run on SAP, accessing these benefits requires creating a digital enterprise with SAP at its heart. 

What CPG can expect from SAP on Google Cloud

SAP drives core business processes across most enterprise functions in CPG companies, and modernizing these operations is step one in unlocking next-level data and analytics capabilities. Creating a digital enterprise with SAP at the core requires establishing a digital foundation on a cloud platform capable of supporting and optimizing SAP workloads well into the future. From there, CPG companies can leverage the combination of SAP data and additional data signals to support high-value use cases utilizing the advanced analytics capabilities of the cloud

For CPG companies, running a successful digital enterprise in this climate depends on the power of the cloud because of the unmatched agility, security, scale, and flexibility offered by cloud technologies. More and more, consumer brands are turning to Google Cloud to host their applications—including core enterprise applications such as SAP—to drive business agility and maximize the value of data through smart analytics and machine learning. Google Cloud establishes a digital foundation for SAP customers by simplifying SAP deployments and offering  a suite of applications that integrates with and enhances SAP functionality. A Forrester study on the total economic value of Google Cloud for SAP customers found an average payback of less than six months and a total ROI of over 160%. By turning to Google Cloud to run their SAP systems, companies are able to: 

• Maximize insights 
  CPG enterprise data is often fragmented across disparate systems. Google’s analytics tools including BigQuery and Looker allow businesses to connect customer, operational and business data at scale by unifying data from SAP systems with other Google data signals such as Ads, Maps, Shopping or Google Marketing Platform. This precious data is fully democratized, allowing for complex queries to be completed rapidly so companies can uncover and analyze insights and create an end-to-end view of the consumer and the business.
• Create an intelligent organization
  Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities allow businesses to create built-in intelligence. Instead of reacting to trends, they can accurately predict them. For marketing teams, this could be the ability to evaluate promotions and effectiveness of marketing spend. For forecasting, product quantities and restock timing can be better planned. Supply chain optimization can include external data sources to closely monitor inventory and eliminate stock outs. 
• Future-proof your business
  Running SAP systems on Google Cloud creates an agile, secure and highly available environment that scales quickly as a business grows and as the CPG market evolves. A recent study conducted by IDC showed that SAP on Google Cloud deployments resulted in a 46% lower three-year cost of operations with 83% less frequent unplanned downtime and 56% more efficient IT teams. This frees IT resources to drive innovation and customer centricity. 
• Deliver on sustainability 
  Around the globe, consumers are becoming more and more demanding regarding sustainability. The impact of climate change and the abundance of plastic waste is only fueling this trend. Consumers are leaning into social signalling, and CPG companies are taking note. Sustainable IT is step #1, significantly advanced by  moving applications to Google Cloud, the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve neutralized all of our carbon emissions since our founding in 1998 and matched 100% of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases since 2017. Google Cloud allows SAP enterprises to further drive sustainability compliance and business objectives with AI and ML tools that can drive down waste and provide real-time decision making power to support proactive green initiatives. 

Rémy Cointreau is in high spirits after deploying SAP in the Google Cloud

Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned international maker of fine spirits, has products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. But this long production cycle presents some unique challenges in today’s hyper-competitive premium beverage brands market. Since 1724, the company has been consumed with putting its customers first. In 2020, the company realized it was failing to capitalize on the benefits that the cloud can provide and began searching for a business partner that could help with this transformation.  

Rémy Cointreau made the move to Google Cloud for many reasons. First, the company could connect its SAP backbone to key SaaS applications like Salesforce. This enabled the creation of a 360-view of data among its ecommerce platform, SAP, and Salesforce to deliver sophisticated customer experiences that reflect the heart of the brand. The Rémy Cointreau team quickly realized they now had the ability to be more agile in their finance, manufacturing, and supply chain functions with easy access to valuable SAP system data that drives decision-making. Sebastien Huet, the company’s CTO, explains: “Now that we’re fully deployed on Google Cloud Platform, anything is possible. We can pull data in from multiple sources via integration and analyze it in a matter of days. We don’t need a three-month project to see value.”  

In today’s on-demand, omnichannel world, it’s not enough for CPG brands to understand their consumers. For companies like Rémy Cointreau, it is mission-critical that they anticipate consumer preferences and deliver personalized experiences. The winners will be the companies that can reduce time to insights by treating all their data as strategic assets, breaking down data silos to enable real-time business intelligence. With SAP on Google Cloud, CPGs are transforming consumer relationships and business outcomes.

Are you ready to change how your CPG brand operates? Check out this video and read the Google Cloud for SAP CPG customer white paper and ebook.  Learn more about how your peers are leveraging SAP on Google Cloud to evolve their businesses.

For far too long, managing employee expenses has been a time-consuming process that requires manual data entry and reconciliation to bridge the gap between business bank accounts and ERP systems. In the absence of an integrated workflow, finance teams use multiple systems to manage credit card and cash payments, and finding receipts. In most cases, they also lack real-time visibility into company spending.

The complexity grows exponentially as businesses expand, especially into new regions. Extra administration required to manage new bank accounts, card issuers, and local accounting systems impedes decision making and negatively impacts revenues and growth. Businesses of all sizes struggle with this, but it can be especially challenging for medium to large enterprises.

Payhawk set out to help businesses overcome these challenges when we founded the company in 2018. We combine VISA company cards, reimbursable expenses, and accounts payable into a single product. Our customers can automate manual processes, maximize efficiency, and accelerate business expansion.

Setting up our first cloud cluster in less than a week

To support growth and attract investment we were keen to launch our solution on a scalable, future-proof IT architecture that didn’t require extensive technical support. This is where Google Cloud made a big impression, especially the user interface and documentation which massively reduces the resources required to set up clusters and put them into production.

I’m a CTO, not a DevOps specialist, but in less than a week I was able to set up a secure, reliable operating infrastructure. This enabled us to fast-track our application development and we were able to issue our first card in just eight months. Our Google Cloud partner, Cloud Office also gave us valuable assistance, guiding us through the deployment process and advising on Google Cloud’s extensive range of solutions.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) played a critical role, accelerating the deployment and management of our cloud native applications. We use Cloud SQL as our database while other important tools include Cloud Memorystore, Vision AI, Cloud Storage and Artifact Registry for our wider data storage and application needs. With Firebase we’ve been able to build a notification system for mobile devices.

Another incentive is that most other cloud solutions require add-on services to build and keep your product live. With Google Cloud, all the services that Payhawk needs including logging, metrics, monitoring of resources, and utilization of CPU memory come as standard.

For instance, I was really impressed by Google Cloud’s operations suite, which includes Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. If there are any anomalies in our cloud architecture, we can track and resolve them with minimal disruption to our operations. This also removes the need to invest in an additional observability solution.

Reliability that builds customer trust

Google Cloud also supports Payhawk’s mission to put customers at the center of our organization. Thanks to Google Cloud error reporting and tracking and Google Cloud single sign on, Payhawk’s engineering team can anticipate customer issues and correct them in less than one hour. Trust is everything, and Google Cloud gives us the tools to boost customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships.

As a young business, managing costs is also a priority. The Google for Startups Cloud Program, which includes credits for Google software and tools, enabled us to push the business forward without having to worry about financing our infrastructure, especially in the first year. This gave us breathing room to work through funding, application development, and the onboarding of our first customers.

In addition, Google Cloud gives us confidence that we can grow the business fast. In most months we have seen more than 10% growth — in some cases it’s been 20%. In the first half of 2022, the business doubled in size, but Google Cloud gave us the flexibility to scale our infrastructure, adding storage, memory, and processing power as we onboarded new customers. The pricing model is also generous so that we can grow our revenues while keeping control of operational expenditure.

Since launch we have acquired a valuable mix of customers from startups to large businesses that want to reduce the costs of their expenses programs and increase employee satisfaction. They include ATU, a German automobile servicing company, which has successfully digitized its entire procurement process, and Discordia, a Bulgarian logistics business with 10,000 trucks, which has issued Payhawk cards to all its drivers.

Looking to the future, it’s no exaggeration to say that Google Cloud is a foundation of our business and has given investors confidence in our operations. From a first seeding round of €3 million, early this year we closed a Series B extension of $100 million. This gives us a valuation of $1bn and makes Payhawk the first ever Bulgarian unicorn.

We now operate in 32 countries in Europe and the US, and plan to double our team by the end of the year. It feels like we’ve come a long way since we first started using Google Cloud, and I’m thrilled that we have Google Cloud as a global technology partner supporting our mission to transform expense management and financial operations worldwide.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Organizations are pressed with the need to engage, retain, and upskill employees with many positions staying fully or partially remote as the pandemic continues. The Center for Digital Government (CDG) reports that 74% of state and local governments believe they will continue hybrid operations for the long-term. This transition is the latest in a long list of reasons agencies are looking for solutions to help train their workforce digitally. Some have found Google Classroom to be the perfect solution.

The State of Iowa knew about the advantages of digital classrooms even before the pandemic. They were already successfully using Google Classroom for in-person training, making the transition to digital seamless when the state closed down. Jessica Van Heuveln, a Google support specialist for the State of Iowa CIO’s Office, says the switch to digital doesn’t deprive workers of hands-on training. “You can use Google Classroom for many different environments, so if you’re doing self-taught, in-person or virtual training, it’s going to work with all those approaches.”

The logistics of a digital classroom

Iowa uses Google Classroom to onboard and upskill employees as well as train volunteers. When the pandemic shifted the state’s workforce to 70% working from home, they needed a  platform that could not only handle a vast range of topics and teaching styles to support remote workers but also scale to meet their demand. Van Heuveln notes that Google Classroom was particularly helpful for handling compliance training, especially with its integration with Google Meet. These trainings often require an entire sector of the workforce to attend a single class with more than 100 attendees, according to Van Heuveln. The logistics of these larger sessions cuts down on the number of total sessions the state needs to host. Iowa also found that employees were less apprehensive about learning when they could do it from the comfort of their own homes.

Iowa follows a train-the-trainer model to train employees expected to instruct using Google Classroom. Trainers working in departments across the state learn to use Google Classroom to create and host virtual learning experiences specific to their own departments. 

Collaborative classrooms made simple

Google Classroom meets many needs for Iowa, such as setting up training, managing attendance, reviewing uploaded coursework, and communicating with attendees. Both course attendees and trainers have everything they need in one place, and robust engagement tools help attendees stay focused while giving trainers the feedback they need from their lessons. Built-in survey options let trainers gauge attendee knowledge, and the chat function ensures no one ever misses a question. The reporting dashboard gives trainers access to analytics to track engagement and attendance, providing insights that can improve future training sessions.

Google Classroom also makes it easier to ensure attendees stay on board throughout the training program. Coursework can be uploaded directly into Google Classroom, and training sessions can be recorded and archived. This feature allows employees to work at their own pace or lets them catch up when a scheduling conflict means they might miss a session.

The enterprise version of Google Classroom Iowa uses interfaces with other Google Workspace tools such as Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Gmail, which streamlines training and leads to more collaboration between employees and trainers. It can also interface with applications from other providers, further boosting its utility as an effective virtual classroom. Google Drive stores training materials securely. Lastly, Google Classroom enterprise comes with 24/7 support to make sure agencies always have everything they need for success.

Helping employees be better prepared to serve

Google Classroom can be a powerful part of any training program, whether it be digital or in-person. Building virtual connections empowers organizations to deliver better experiences. Google Classroom is helping the State of Iowa accomplish this for their constituents. Designed to scale and be accessible from anywhere, the platform helps public employees better serve the public. Virtual training strategies are essential for agencies that are looking to grow their workforce and build employee skill levels. The most important thing, however, is that training programs enable employees to further your agency’s mission. To learn more about Google Classroom and see more solutions designed with government in mind, check out the Google Cloud for government page.