The Dutch cloud banking platform built its business helping institutions modernise their cores. Its new Swift Enabler certification bets that the same appetite for managed infrastructure will pull Gulf banks and fintechs onto its cross-border rails.

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For decades, joining Swift meant standing up dedicated infrastructure, staffing security teams to manage it, absorbing the compliance overhead that comes with sitting on the world's most sensitive financial messaging network, and often paying an intermediary bank for the privilege. That requirement is quietly loosening. On 16 July, Dutch cloud banking platform Mambu confirmed it had been certified as an Enabler under Swift's Business Connect and Value-Added Services programme, allowing it to plug financial institutions into Swift's roughly 12,000-member network through a fully managed, cloud-native model rather than the on-premises apparatus that has defined access to global correspondent banking for a generation.

The certification lands at a moment when banks in the Gulf, and the neobanks, fintechs, and payment institutions that increasingly compete with them, are under pressure to expand cross-border reach without adding the kind of infrastructure their competitors are trying to shed. Regulators from the Central Bank of the UAE to the Saudi Central Bank have pushed instant-payment initiatives, ISO 20022 adoption, and interoperability across regional rails including AFAQ and Buna, while private-sector institutions look for ways to deepen dollar and euro clearing without the sunk cost of legacy systems. Cloud-native Swift access, delivered as a service, is one of the more consequential answers on the market.

From a Belgian Go-Live to a Global Rollout

Mambu's certification comes alongside live customers on its Swift Alliance Cloud connectivity, integrated directly into the Mambu Payments Hub. BankB has become the first bank to switch on the setup, using it to route flows through ING, its Single Euro Payments Area sponsor bank. Additional institutions are onboarding in the coming weeks, according to the company, spanning European banks and payment providers that were early adopters of the wider Mambu Payments platform launched in 2025.

The Enabler tier in Swift's Business Connect programme sits between direct participants and traditional service bureaus, giving certified providers responsibility for the technical channel while institutions retain their own Swift BIC and correspondent relationships. In practice, that arrangement lets a bank keep sovereignty over its Swift identity while outsourcing the plumbing that carries its messages. That distinction matters increasingly as instant-payment mandates and ISO 20022 migration raise the operational load on smaller banks.

“We're proud to bring fully managed Swift connectivity to our customers. BankB is already live, using our Swift Alliance Cloud connectivity to connect to ING as their SEPA sponsor bank, and we have several more institutions completing their Swift onboarding and set to go live in the coming weeks. This certification means our customers can access Swift's global network without the operational burden of managing the infrastructure themselves,” said Édouard Mandon, VP Payments at Mambu.

Mandon joined the company through Mambu's late-2024 acquisition of Numeral, the Paris-based payments technology firm he co-founded and which processed more than €10 billion in payments annually before the deal. That acquisition, followed by the launch of the Payments Hub, signalled Mambu's ambition to move beyond core banking software into the payment orchestration layer, where much of the industry's spending is now concentrated.

Why Cloud-Native Swift Access Matters for Smaller Institutions

For the region's mid-tier banks and licensed fintechs, the economics of on-premises Swift access have long been a barrier. A typical setup requires hardware, network segmentation, dedicated security staff, and adherence to Swift's Customer Security Programme, an annual attestation regime that has grown steadily more demanding since a series of high-profile network compromises last decade. Many smaller institutions have relied on sponsor banks or aggregators, arrangements that add cost per transaction and cede visibility over payment flows.

Managed cloud connectivity shifts that balance. Mambu, as the certified Enabler, takes on infrastructure, security, and compliance obligations on its customers' behalf while sitting inside the Swift Alliance Cloud environment. The Payments Hub then acts as a single control layer for cross-border flows, domestic schemes, sponsor bank relationships, and connections to market infrastructures, reducing the number of vendors an institution has to manage to be internationally payments-active.

“Connecting to Swift through Mambu's Alliance Cloud connectivity allows us to centralise all our bank payments via one gateway, serviced through our SEPA sponsor bank relationship with ING. The implementation with Mambu Payments was realised quickly and reliably. Payment operations on Mambu's platform are more streamlined, increase efficiency and enable us to better serve our customers,” said Patrick Herwegh, CIO at BankB.

The Broader Payments Modernisation Story

The certification is one strand of a larger reordering of who builds and who consumes payments infrastructure. Mambu now supports more than 260 customers across over 65 countries, a client list that includes Western Union, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, N26, BancoEstado, Raiffeisen Bank, ABN AMRO, and Bank Islam. Rivals including Thought Machine, Temenos, and 10x Banking are pursuing variations on the same thesis, that composable, cloud-native software will supplant the monolithic core systems still running much of global banking.

For the Gulf specifically, the timing is notable. UAE and Saudi banks have accelerated cloud migrations, with recent moves such as Standard Chartered's rebuild of its global technology core on Broadcom's private cloud pointing to how quickly the shift is progressing at the top of the market. What Mambu's Swift certification offers is a version of that modernisation available to institutions further down the size spectrum: a way to plug into global payment rails without owning the infrastructure. Whether cloud-native access to Swift becomes the default rather than the exception will depend on regulatory comfort and internal risk appetite, but the direction of travel is now clearer than it was a year ago.

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