NewTech Friday: Tuum - a next gen core banking offering

What led to the creation of Tuum?

There were three key drivers that led to the creation of Tuum in 2019.

First, there was direct customer demand. For years, we were designing and building tailored transformative technologies for incumbent banks and other financial institutions with our previous technology company Icefire (recently acquired by Europe's largest unicorn Checkout.com). At one point, our customers started asking why we don't put all that experience, quality, and flexibility into a product and make it available as a platform, as this translates to lower risk and accelerated market entry for them.

Second, as we started looking into what already existed on the market, we found a huge gap - newcomers were mostly covering a narrow field of the banking business (e.g. just lending), and those offering a broader platform focused almost entirely on retail banking. We understood that, based on our experience, we can bring something to the market that has significant value to add.

 

In addition, the timing seemed perfect as the market in general had opened up to cloud-based banking solutions. This was not the case a few years ago when banks were not yet willing to buy banking capabilities as a service. 

Could you present Tuum's offer?

Tuum is a next generation core banking technology provider for established financial institutions, fintechs, and non-financial companies. Our platform enables businesses to gradually transform their financial capabilities or to rapidly deploy completely new financial services and products. 

 

What sets us apart is that our API-first platform consists of independent modules, enabling the client to pick and choose the capabilities they need without having to implement the whole platform at once. Our comprehensive functional coverage for retail as well as business banking - accounts, deposits, loans, payments, collaterals, financial accounting, cards - makes our clients' lives easier, as they can stick to one provider for the core functionalities (while still avoiding vendor lock-in). This provides them with more flexibility and also helps to mitigate risks. In addition, we are cloud-agnostic, meaning our platform is capable of operating with any cloud provider (also on-premise). 

 

 

Just as the financial services industry is constantly changing and developing, a core banking platform can also never remain static. It's always possible to do things faster, safer, and with broader coverage. This is exactly what we are working on regularly: expanding our capabilities in every aspect.

 

Currently, one of the main focuses for us is better support for corporate banking use cases, as this is something we need to cover in order to guarantee successful digital transformation in large banking groups. Most of the newcomers are operating in the retail banking space, having maybe slightly touched upon the business banking part as well. However, true corporate banking capabilities have remained untouched for the majority of core technology providers. We will also be committing more to digital assets, decentralized finance and crypto, to be prepared for and ready to respond to these developments on the market.

 

In addition, we will naturally be expanding our partner ecosystem, which is a two-way street: our partners bring their best of breed solutions to our platform, adding value through out-of-the-box integrations, but we also bring our capabilities to other ecosystems and platforms. 

 

Regarding new markets, we've recently established our third base (the first two being Tallinn and Berlin) in Malaga, Spain. Looking towards the future, we are in the process of establishing a base of operations in the UK, with further expansion into overseas territories to follow.