League Data Transforms Credit Unions Across Atlantic Canada Using Mambu on AWS

League Data, a FinTech cooperative based in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, received news that its core banking software, an outsourced legacy system running on mainframe hardware, was going to reach end of life in a few years. This had the potential to disrupt operations for the  37 credit unions that operate across Canada’s 4 Atlantic provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island—because League Data provided banking infrastructure to those credit unions using that legacy software.

Credit unions are a form of member-owned cooperative financial institution, usually operating locally or regionally, and provide day-to-day banking services to about 6 million Canadians. Because they are much smaller than Canada’s national banks, credit unions face a challenge building the infrastructure needed to provide services comparable to the large banks. League Data was established in 1975 as an aggregator of services, providing better buying power and giving the credit unions it serves a united voice and access to products and services they could not easily afford on their own. In turn, this increases buying power and gives the group a stronger voice. “Over the last 50 years, we’ve worked to meet the needs of credit unions and help them serve their communities,” says Chad Griffin, chief executive officer of League Data. “We’ve seen a lot of changes in the industry, so this end-of-life warning was simply the latest. Replacing the core banking system gave us the chance to modernize to meet current needs and set ourselves and our customers up for the future.”

League Data began evaluating solution providers. It was looking for a company that would fulfill core functions but would also enable League Data to customize features, because each of its credit union customers needed a system that fitted its specific product offerings. It was also important that the solution could be customized to meet Canadian financial regulations and evolve as new regulations and financial products and services became available.

Mambu, a Netherlands-based software as a service (SaaS) provider of financial infrastructure, won League Data’s attention because it matched the company’s taste for innovation. “It was a very forward thinking decision for a traditional banking institution, a credit union collective, to make,” says Griffin. “We could have played it safer-in-the-now with another legacy banking solution and taken a less future-oriented path. But in terms of the time to convert and the ability to continue to service the market in a way that we’ve known, it would have created tremendous risk, with a likelihood of requiring another conversion as that core banking platform aged out.”

League Data anticipated that the coming years would require more than a business-as-usual approach. It expected open banking—the requirement for financial services providers to support interoperability with FinTech startups and competing incumbents—to come to Canada. It saw a need to collaborate with FinTechs, modernize payments, and keep up with credit union members’ evolving expectations for a rich digital experience. “League Data was really looking to maintain the spirit of innovation that it was founded on,” says Amber Harsin, vice president of credit unions at Mambu. “It wanted freedom and flexibility to create bespoke journeys rather than have its options—and its customers’ options—dictated by its vendor. Being able to integrate its own innovation and have them work with Mambu was important to the success of the modernization.”

Mambu’s SaaS banking products are built on AWS, which meant the move to a safe, secure cloud infrastructure was part of the overall modernization and migration for League Data. “In addition to Mambu’s core banking, we needed to be able to integrate a range of tools and applications from more than 20 partners,” says Wendy Spears, digital banking program manager at League Data. “AWS has great flexibility, a ton of tools, and excellent support for APIs. Even getting certification for our new system was much easier because of the documentation, the robust security, and the privacy controls that come with AWS.”

League Data has been using Mulesoft, an API platform that Griffin considers core to the technology modernization. “It has allowed us to create a more robust API catalog that gives us some ecosystem autonomy,” he says. “If we want to deal with different partners, we have the ability. It connects to Mambu and runs on AWS, has a very reliable track record, and is scalable.”

Because Mambu’s core banking solution is API friendly, League Data has been able to incorporate products and services from AWS and other vendors and can also develop its own applications. “Mambu sees itself as a really lean banking core that is API led,” says Griffin. “That meant we could develop the specific tools we needed, such as support for our customers’ brick-and-mortar branches. We created AWS-hosted portlets that snap in seamlessly and get served up on the user interface side in Mambu.”

In addition to Mambu, key AWS services used include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service that means Mambu will be able to scale as the organization grows, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for resizable compute power. It also uses Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) to manage Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations, making it easier for developers and DevOps managers to run Apache Kafka applications and Apache Kafka Connect connectors on AWS; and Amazon OpenSearch Service, which allows League Data to run search workloads simply without the hassle of configuring, managing, and scaling OpenSearch clusters. 

Less than 3 years after League Data received the end-of-life warning, it had implemented a new core banking system with Mambu and migrated the majority of its operations to the cloud. It also successfully migrated its first customer, Brunswick Credit Union, to the new platform.

In the following year, more than 35 credit unions were migrated to the new system. League Data works with the credit unions to help them prepare for migration and, after the preparation is complete, League Data can do the actual cutover to the new system in less than 48 hours with no disruption to services.

League Data is now positioned for future challenges and opportunities that will come to Canada’s financial services industry, thanks to its collaboration with Mambu and AWS. The ecosystem they have built features components from more than 20 partners and supports 37 credit unions. “Some folks talk about agility in their approach and their model,” says Griffin. “We’ve actually got it stem to stern. We can confidently say, ‘Yeah, we know that we can do that.’ Using Mambu and AWS, we’ve built a flexible foundation for the future.”