Interview with Tommi Lassila: Revolutionizing Core Banking with Aura Cloud
TL;DR
In an exclusive interview Tommi Lassila reveals:
Aura Cloud is transforming the core banking sector with its next-generation platform, emphasizing agility, automation, and a range of modular services that support both SMEs and retail banking customers.
Aura Cloud has invested over a million hours into developing a platform that significantly reduces IT costs, allows rapid deployment, and integrates easily with vendors without the need for custom coding or heavy consultancy.
Aura Cloud's partnership with Enable Banking strengthens its capabilities, especially in areas like credit issuance and decision-making. Enable Banking’s expertise in open banking APIs helps Aura Cloud deliver more automated, data-driven solutions.
Agility and efficiency are crucial for core banking to meet the demands of banks and fintechs today. Aura Cloud is at the forefront of this transformation with its next-generation core banking platform. We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Tommi Lassila, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Aura Cloud, to learn more about their cutting-edge solutions and what the future holds for the industry.
To start, could you please tell us a little about yourself and Aura Cloud?
My name is Tommi Lassila, and I’ve had a long career in payments, fintech, and banking. I’ve worked for companies like SEB, American Express, Visa, and Luottokunta (now Nets). At Aura Cloud, I’m responsible for sales and partnerships. Our mission is simple: to make banks and fintechs more agile, foster innovation, and improve cost efficiency. Ultimately, we aim to provide end customers with better services, a greater customer focus, and improved cost-income ratios.
Tell us some more about Aura Cloud’s core banking services.
Aura Cloud is a next-generation core banking platform. We offer a comprehensive range of services, including loans, accounts, cards, and payments. Our platform also leverages open banking APIs to streamline processes such as real-time payments and lending. Beyond that, we provide modules for innovative services like factoring, peer-to-peer lending, and marketplace loyalty and rewards. Our platform is designed to meet the needs of both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and retail banking customers, and thanks to PSD2 regulations, we can integrate seamlessly with a wide range of financial services.
What services does Aura Cloud offer?
Aura Cloud is a next-generation core banking platform. We offer a comprehensive range of services, including loans, accounts, cards, and payments. Our platform also leverages open banking APIs to streamline processes such as real-time payments and lending. Beyond that, we provide modules for innovative services like factoring, peer-to-peer lending, and marketplace loyalty and rewards. Our platform is designed to meet the needs of both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and retail banking customers, and thanks to PSD2 regulations, we can integrate seamlessly with a wide range of financial services.
What makes Aura Cloud stand out in the market?
What truly sets us apart is that our platform is ready to use. Over the past decade, we’ve invested more than 1.2 million hours of development into Aura Cloud, making it a robust and highly configurable solution. It allows our clients to innovate without being bogged down by rigid, outdated systems. Whether you're a fintech or a small bank, Aura Cloud offers the agility and cost efficiency that modern institutions demand, aided by our deep integration with PSD2 open banking APIs.
Who are Aura Cloud’s typical customers?
Our customer base includes well-established fintechs in Sweden and Finland, particularly those with Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licenses. We’re also expanding into partnerships with small and mid-sized banks, and even engaging in discussions with larger banks. The new trend in banking is to adopt different core banking solutions for different areas, and we fit right into this shift. Our customers are institutions with a strong focus on innovation and efficiency, looking to scale their operations without inflating back-office costs.
What are some of the platform’s key features?
We aim to automate end-to-end core banking processes as much as possible, reducing IT costs and enabling customers to operate our platform with a minimal in-house IT team. This approach leads to significant efficiency gains.
One of the key benefits of Aura Cloud is its speed. For greenfield customers, we can bring them into production in just 12 to 16 weeks. Our fully configurable core banking platform, combined with extensive banking API integrations, allows us to integrate with various vendors without requiring custom coding or heavy consultancy work. This agility helps our clients get their products to market quickly and efficiently.
Aura Cloud is both a cloud-native and cloud-agnostic core banking platform, meaning it can run on any cloud provider, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. As an API-first platform—even for back-office operations—we ensure high levels of automation and flexibility. Our certifications, such as ISO 27001 and ISO 9001, ensure that our platform is robust, secure, and scalable. With this foundation, we empower our clients to lower IT costs while operating with minimal in-house teams. The integration of open banking APIs and transactional data allows us to offer more intelligent, data-driven solutions that respond to customer needs in real time.
Can you tell us about Aura Cloud’s partnership with Enable Banking and how Enable Banking enhance your platform’s capabilities?
Our journey with Enable Banking has been fantastic. The collaboration has been open and transparent, with both companies aligned in a shared mission: helping clients succeed through innovation. Their focus on Open Banking APIs, combined with their comprehensive offering, has been instrumental in strengthening our services, particularly in credit issuance and automated credit decision-making.
Open banking has evolved from a “nice-to-have” to a critical component of modern financial services. For us, it is especially valuable in competitive financing markets, where having real-time access to transactional data is invaluable, enabling better, more automated credit decisions. Enable Banking’s extensive coverage and industry expertise play a vital role in this, helping us deliver faster, more accurate services to our clients.
I would also highlight Enable Banking’s deep industry understanding, robust offering, good coverage and commitment to building long-term partnerships. Their dedication to helping customers succeed has made them an invaluable partner in driving our mutual success.
How is AI affecting banking?
AI is definitely a buzzword right now, but the potential benefits are significant. The biggest gains initially will be in back-office work. Our goal is already to minimize back-office needs for our customers, and AI will play a huge role in automating even more manual processes.
In the long term, AI will take a large role in replacing many kinds of manual processes. It will also transform data analysis, allowing banks to offer better, more automated services that don’t feel robotic. I think user interfaces will also evolve, to the point that eventually, we might see voice-based interactions, where you’re essentially talking to your core banking platform like you would a colleague.
Just for fun, what will banks look like in 100 years?
Oh, that’s a tough one. I think there’s a strong likelihood that you won’t see the banks—they’ll be behind the scenes. You won’t be excited to go to the bank; you’ll just want the services and for everything to happen seamlessly. I think that’s where we’re headed—banks will disappear into the background.
As for what those brands will look like, that’s a whole other debate! At the same time, the key element that has driven the success of banking for hundreds of years is trust. As long as the trust is there, whether you see the bank or not doesn’t matter, it’s about trusting the services, even if you never physically interact with the bank.
What is an unusual but insightful way to think about banking?
There’s an old joke that a typical legacy core banking project kills two CIOs. It’s a bad joke, but in many cases, that’s been the unfortunate truth when it comes to managing core banking migrations and renewals.
But with solutions like Aura Cloud, we can do things very differently, and very fast. You can break the project into smaller chunks and even run multiple cores—you don’t have to replace everything at once. It’s a completely different approach, and it’s becoming quite common. I often use the metaphor that you might have a diesel engine under the hood of your car, but you want the agility of an electric car. You don’t need to replace the diesel engine—you just add an agile electric motor to the back axle. That’s what Aura Cloud is—it’s the agile electric engine.
We see too many examples where small banks engage in heavy legacy system renewals that end up killing both their finances and customer experience. Years get lost in projects that don’t deliver a return on investment, and product development is often frozen during that time. It’s not good for anyone. But with fresh thinking and a next-generation core platform like ours, you can do miracles in a very short time.
What’s next for Aura Cloud in the coming years?
We have ambitious growth plans. While we’re currently focused on the Nordics, we aim to expand into new markets across Europe and beyond. We’re already in discussions with potential clients in different regions, and in five years, we expect to have a much larger footprint in the financial sector. AI will also play a huge role in our future, particularly in automating back-office processes and transforming data analysis.
How can we learn more about Aura Cloud?
The easiest way is to visit Auracloud.com. I’m also happy to have a conversation with anyone interested in learning more about how our platform can solve specific challenges. The more ambitious the project, the more excited we get!
Aura Cloud is redefining what’s possible in core banking by making agility, flexibility, and innovation the cornerstones of its platform. At Enable Banking, we’re proud to partner with Aura Cloud, supporting their mission to empower financial institutions through open banking and seamless integration.
If you want to know how our next-gen Open Banking API can take your core banking services to the next level, we'd love to help you get started.