Global Fintech Interview with Casper Rasmussen, President at MACH Alliance

Hi Casper, being the President at the MACH Alliance, tell us about your journey so far.

I was passionate about digital and tech from an early age. When I was just 12, I started my own business offering design and implementation services, and a commercial CMS product to small local businesses. I’ve been addicted to digital ever since. My experience over the last two decades or so has taken me through lots of different industries, a great variety of enterprise-grade stacks and established and startup-like business models. Lots of real and legitimate business transformation!

Throughout my career, one success criteria ruled them all – flexibility. Flexibility to follow the increasing digital maturity of the enterprise. Flexibility to pivot. Flexibility to scale. Flexibility to enable business and their ‘just in time’ decisions. It becomes a competitive edge, at this point a requirement, for enterprise companies to compete and thrive in the era of exponential growth, i.e. proliferation of 3rd party channels, ever increasing customer expectations, and simply digital volume and market opportunity. Composable and MACH is THE answer to this, and that got me into technology strategies anchored in Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native SaaS and Headless with my clients.

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Could you please explain a little, Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless. What exactly do they mean?

Combined, MACH offer flexibility and opacity across your architectures. It acts as an alternative to large enterprise suites, which by nature are more closed and less flexible. MACH is an industry tech standard describing modern technology. Modern technology is future proof enterprise technology that can propel current and future digital experiences.

• Microservices offer the granularity of digital services you need.
• API-First offer flexibility in how these services are used – both towards your customers, and towards your business.
• Cloud-native Multi-tenancy SaaS ensure commodities are leveraged to accelerate the introduction of digital services that aren’t unique to any given business. Don’t build and operate yourself where you’re not unique as a business.
• Headless offer infinite opportunity on the experiences you create from the services. It enables integrated journeys, across channels, that feel connected and cohesive to the customer.

What best-of-breed enterprise technology exactly does MACH Alliance provide to its users in their transformation journey?

The MACH Alliance is a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems. The Alliance aims to educate and support the industry as a whole on what to look out for when moving from legacy infrastructure and going composable, including when, where and how to start. Our role is more important than ever as adoption of MACH continues apace. The Alliance is a vendor-neutral institution that provides resources, education and guidance through industry experts to support companies on their journey.

We do not offer ‘Best of breed’ technology ourselves, but our Members do. Whenever a Member is MACH Alliance certified, then we, the Alliance, vouch for the ability for this Member’s technology enable the flexibility, scalability and future-fit promises of MACH.

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Which market segment are you targeting? What does your ideal customer profile look like?

Digital commerce has been ripe for disruption, and this business category has been a natural home for us. We assist and help Enterprise businesses, acting in verticals relying on commerce business models – i.e. Consumer Goods, Retail and more – create a future-fitting alternative to the more heavier-handed enterprise suite options that historically dominated the commerce technology market.

MACH Alliance is an industry tech standard describing modern technology.  Does MACH wish to enter into any other domain too?

Yes, we have three equal focus’ at the moment

• Increase penetration (existing categories in the commerce space)
• Enter new categories within the commerce space – i.e. move deeper into the technology eco-system, to categories such as Payment, CRM, OMS, Supply Chain and more.
• Enter new categories from new verticals, i.e. begin to form memberships around, and drive impact to, Financial Services.

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An event that you would like to attend/ speak at:

We are happy to attend and speak at events that are either 1) technology oriented, like Web Summit, or 2) industry oriented events, relevant to new potential verticals., like Money 2020.

Thank you, Casper ! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]