Customer context

Getmomo is Germany’s number one digital banking platform for the real estate sector, enabling property managers to simplify their rental operations from deposits to managing tenants and collecting rent.

The challenge

To streamline the payment of deposits and rent from tenants to property managers, Getmomo uses accounts from its banking partners. These accounts streamline the property manager’s internal finance processes, allowing them to automate the allocation of payments from tenants.

Getmomo was looking for a secure and reliable partner to help it manage the allocation of money paid to these accounts, and the pay-out orchestration of subsequent payments off the accounts.

We knew we would need a ledger to have a robust and auditable solution from day 1, but were hesitant to invest significant resources into building something that would not differentiate us in the eyes of customers. That is what made us start looking for ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions.

RossCPO at Getmomo

Why Formance

There were several compelling reasons why Getmomo chose Formance over building in-house or other options available in the market:

Granular sub-account modelling → The flexible account naming topology of the Formance Ledger allows Getmomo to represent every sub-account and intermediary state of money they have in their business logic. “It's the extra layer that allows us to keep track of every transaction and account balance in the most granular way.”
Open source → Choosing to outsource such a core part of the business was no small decision. The open source nature of the Formance solution gave Getmomo an added level of trust in the integrity of the solution, and the reassurance it needed that the solution would always be available to them.
Lightweight & flexible → Getmomo preferred Formance over traditional core banking systems due to its lightweight and more flexible nature.

Systems like Mambu or Tuum are powerful products but they can become unwieldy and inflexible as soon as you are not building one of the standard cases. They wouldn't have supported our specific scenarios.

RossCPO at Getmomo

Auditable → The Console has proven invaluable, especially for non-technical users like the finance team and external auditors, to have access to this information in a format they can work with. “If we had built the ledger ourselves, we could never justify the development effort required to build the sort of user interface you get with Formance ‘out of the box’”.
Modular and extensible → Getmomo initially considered Formance for the Ledger, before leaning toward more connectivity and automations with Payments and Flows. “We love the modularity and the plug-and-play approach Formance provides. This is what pushed us to expand with the Atlar connector.”
Expanding with the Atlar connector → Formance already had multiple native Connectors to payments and banking providers and the opportunity came up to co-build an Atlar connector with Getmomo. After only 4 weeks of development, the Atlar connector was live and allowed Getmomo to abstract and simplify their payment workflows. More information on how Getmomo uses Atlar for direct banking connectivity.

The results

The partnership with Formance allowed Getmomo to gain more control and flexibility in their financial operations. They were able to implement a more extensive and feature-rich system compared with other solutions or the option of building something in-house. This was not only cost-effective, but also fast, with the entire implementation live in only 4 weeks.

Formance is like our ‘accounting swiss army knife’. They provide us with a set of foundational tools for ledgering and payment initiation that are stable and secure, but still flexible so we can tailor them to our specific needs.

RossCPO at Getmomo

This allows Getmomo to remain focused on the parts of the product that differentiate them in the eyes of customers. As Ross indicates "We are only at the beginning of our journey as a company, and with the strong foundation we have built with Formance we are heading off on a good footing".