EXCLUSIVE: “Plugging Into Payments” – Victor Mithouard and Leon Stevens, Mambu in ‘Discover Money20/20’

Mambu’s acquisition of Numeral comes at a critical moment, particularly for Europe, say Victor Mithouard and Leon Stevens

2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in Europe for payments, an environment that is seeing additional demands being placed on banks and fintechs – creating new opportunities. Not least, the SEPA Instant Payments Regulation now expects service providers in the EU to offer real-time payments, executed within 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and without applying fees higher than traditional credit transfers.

Meanwhile, recent geopolitical shifts have strengthened Europe’s resolve to ensure it has more strategic autonomy over its payments systems.

“In Europe, we’re seeing strong momentum around real-time payments,” says Leon Stevens, Mambu’s Head of EMEA. “Markets like the Nordics and Benelux are really pushing the boundaries with instant, cross-border capabilities. PSD2 and the Instant Payments Regulation laid the foundation, but PSD3 [expected to be implemented in 2026] is likely to accelerate things even further.

“Notably, regulators are now actively pushing for greater competition and a more level playing field, ensuring that innovative fintechs can challenge incumbent Tier 1 banks and drive new waves of innovation. The focus is on seamless, secure, and fast user experiences – and payments are right at the centre of that.”

Europe’s determination to break the region’s reliance on foreign payment schemes was summed up by Christine Lagarde, Head of the European Central Bank, recently.

“Whether you use a card or a phone, typically it goes through Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Alipay,” she said. “Where are all those coming from? Either the US or China. The whole infrastructure mechanism that allows for payments, credit and debit, is not a European solution. Brussels should make sure there is a European offer.”

And it’s trying, by leveraging its own instant settlement schemes for real-time cross-border transactions.

The always-on TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) service is a multi-currency platform that already settles payments within the SEPA Instant credit transfer scheme. But plans are well underway to plug in TIPS to other fast payment systems globally. There are also moves to connect it to a multilateral network of instant payment systems through Project Nexus, led by the Bank for International Settlements.

And, separately, the region is assessing the feasibility of creating a bilateral link between TIPs and India’s Unified Payments Interface. All of that means cross-border transactions should become easier and cheaper if you have sophisticated technology with direct access to Europe’s payments infrastructure. And Mambu, through its acquisition of the payments mechanism provider Numeral, does.

Founded in Berlin in 2011 and headquartered in Amsterdam, Mambu is a Cloud-native platform provider of composable banking services to more than 260 banks, fintechs, retailers, telcos and other global customers. Together, they serve in excess of 110 million end users across more than 65 countries. Mambu focusses on building the underlying framework while providing seamless integrations with specialist partners, so it can customise the stack to suit most businesses.

“In Europe, we’re seeing strong momentum around real-time payments x”

Leon Stevens

In December 2024, Mambu announced that it was acquiring Numeral, a French paytech that had operated as one of Mambu’s standalone plug-ins for its payment functions. Only four years old, but already processing more than £10billion of payments annually, Numeral’s key features include a centralised dashboard for managing payments, reconciliations, and account information across all connected banks; automated bank payment processing, enabling businesses to focus on their core products with real-time access to payment statuses, errors, account balances, and transaction information; and integration with businesses’ systems through a single API, which, it says, ‘abstracts the complexity of building and maintaining direct bank integrations’.

Numeral’s payment operations platform connects to all bank channels, from those that use legacy systems, such as SFTP, to more modern integrations using APIs, allowing businesses to manage payments across multiple institutions. It’s a one-to-many solution. The acquisition saw Mambu Payments Gateway payments platform replaced by Mambu Payments (aka the Numeral integration) as the company works towards integrating Mambu core and Mambu payments in the future.

Key to the deal was Numeral’s significant partnerships with a host of European fintechs, including WorldFirst, Argentex and Alma, and major banks, such as BNP Paribas, Barclays, BPCE, ClearBank and LHV. At the time of the acquisition, Mambu said: “The size of the market opportunity for bank payments is striking. In 2022, the value of bank payments in the Eurozone stood at €191trillion, which is 58 times more than card payments (€3.3trillion)… With its robust bank integrations, a modular API and modern dashboard, Numeral’s platform will enable Mambu to capitalise on this market opportunity.”

The European conundrum

By combining both companies’ expertise, Mambu clearly believes it can help move the regional payments agenda in Europe forward. Because, according to Victor Mithouard, until recently VP of Growth at Numeral, and now Senior Director of Payments at Mambu, ‘Europe is still stuck’.

“Forty per cent of payments are instant in the UK, but only 20 per cent of them are in continental Europe. Markets like Brazil with Pix [64 billion payments a year] and India with UPI [131 billion] have completely leapfrogged to instant payments. Bringing Numeral, with its track record of helping banks and financial institutions migrate from rigid, traditional core systems, into the Mambu fold, will hopefully make a significant impact on this picture.”

Stevens agrees there has been a ‘huge shift’ happening beyond the bloc’s borders.

“Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are investing heavily in building out digital payment infrastructure as part of broader national strategies,” he says. “Many organisations there are skipping over legacy systems entirely and going straight to Cloud-native, API-first, real-time setups. We’re also seeing more non-bank players, especially in retail and telecom, getting serious about embedded finance.

“In Africa, it’s a very different landscape, with infrastructure and regulation still catching up in places, but markets like Kenya and Nigeria are leading with mobile money and digital wallets, and the focus now is on interoperability and scalability. The direction across all regions is clear: faster, simpler, more connected payment experiences.”

The road ahead

This year’s Mambu Partner Predictions Report identified the accelerated adoption of AI, open finance and embedded finance as being among the top trends for 2025.

“We believe that every company is going to become a payments company or financial services company “

Victor Mithouard

AI, it says, will boost the efficiency and security of transactions for customers, as ‘sophisticated algorithms capable of analysing large amounts of data in real-time [can] identify valuable patterns and anomalies – aiding fraud detection and heightening customer satisfaction’.

Open finance, meanwhile, will be leveraged to bring new services to market while ‘going beyond regulatory compliance to unlock growth opportunities’. But embedded finance – integrating banking, lending, insurance, and investment services into apps and platforms used by companies outside of the finance sector – is predicted to ‘create endless opportunities for innovation’ and put control firmly ‘in the hands of non-financial players’.

Mithouard confirms that embedded finance is a big focus for Mambu right now.

“We believe that every company is going to become a payments company or a financial services company,” he says. “Embedded finance can be so seamlessly integrated with most experiences that there’s no reason customer-centric organisations wouldn’t want to adopt it.”

Stevens is seeing that already playing out in real time.

“Fintechs embedding BNPL, telcos launching mobile wallets, and even established banks opening up their capabilities to third parties through banking-as-a-service models – Mambu’s role is to make this not just possible, but easy because these experiences need to be built on infrastructure that’s flexible, modular, and fast to launch,” he says.

Meanwhile, borders are already being erased by the likes of Wise and Revolut, points out Mithouard.

“And that’s only going to increase. But a lot of companies won’t be able to do this last-mile connectivity to so many payment systems. That’s where we come in – to level the playing field for innovators to ensure that you can really deliver that global payment experience seamlessly.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time for everyone involved.”

This article was published in Discover Money20/20 2025, Page 26-27