Mambu’s Cloud Banking to Serve Cake, Vietnam’s Newest Digital Bank\

Cake, the Vietnamese digital bank born from a partnership between Be Group and VP Bank, has selected Mambu’s SaaS cloud banking platform to underpin its expansion. This move allows the digital-first challenger to scale its operations and roll out a full suite of financial services to millions of ride-hailing users, marking a significant step in Vietnam's competitive fintech landscape.

What was announced

Cake is integrating Mambu’s cloud-native platform to facilitate the rapid deployment of flexible financial products and reduce transaction processing times. Launched in January 2021, Cake represents a strategic collaboration between Be Group—the entity behind the "Be" ride-hailing application—and VP Bank. While beFinancial manages the bank's operations, all services are licensed through VP Bank by the State Bank of Vietnam. The platform is specifically designed to serve the 10 million existing drivers and customers within the Be ecosystem, with a primary focus on Gen Z and young professional consumers.

By leveraging Mambu’s technology, Cake aims to transition from its current state into a full-service digital bank. This includes simplifying everyday financial tasks such as paying for goods and services, saving money, and receiving deposits. The partnership is positioned as a way to enhance financial inclusion in Vietnam by providing easier access to banking for a mobile-first population. Myles Bertrand at Mambu noted that the Vietnamese digital banking market is currently highly active, and that Cake's specific link to a ride-hailing app makes it a unique offering in that space. The integration is expected to make financial activities like receiving deposits and saving money significantly simpler for the user base by tapping into an already established and loyal customer network.

"In order to provide a superior customer experience we need to enable the rapid launch of flexible and unique products, as well as shorten processing times for transactions. We selected Mambu’s cloud banking platform as it is the most innovative and versatile solution on the market,"

Mr. Nguyen Huu Quang, CEO of beFinancial

The companies involved

Cake is a digital banking solution in Vietnam, established through a collaboration between Be Group and VP Bank. Be Group is the organization behind the "Be" ride-hailing application, while VP Bank is recognized as one of Vietnam’s leading financial institutions. Within this partnership, beFinancial, a division of Be Group, is responsible for the operations of the digital bank. All products and services offered by Cake are fully licensed by the State Bank of Vietnam through VP Bank’s regulatory framework.

Mambu provides a SaaS cloud banking platform that is described as an innovative and versatile solution for the market. The company’s leadership in the region includes Myles Bertrand as Managing Director APAC and Pham Quang Minh as General Manager for Vietnam. Mambu’s technology is designed to enable financial institutions to achieve faster time-to-market and flexible scalability. In the context of the Vietnamese market, the company is focused on improving access to financial services for young consumers and enabling financial inclusion. By offering a cloud-native infrastructure, the platform allows partners to meet evolving customer expectations for speed and security in an active digital banking market.

What this means

This partnership highlights the growing trend of embedded finance where non-financial platforms, like ride-hailing apps, become the primary gateway for banking services. By choosing a SaaS provider like Mambu, Cake is signaling that speed and agility are the primary weapons in the fight for Vietnam’s Gen Z market. Traditional banks in the region are now under pressure to modernize their core systems or risk losing the next generation of consumers to these hyper-integrated ecosystems. The success of this model will likely determine if other regional platforms follow suit by decoupling from legacy infrastructure entirely.