Stratum by Mascoma: A Banker-Built SaaS Platform That Aims to Rewrite Core Banking Modernization
Mascoma Technologies Launches Stratum to Give Banks a Real Alternative to Core Overhauls
Bankers are tired of the binary choice between clunky legacy cores and the risky leap to entirely new tech stacks. Enter Stratum, a newly commercialized SaaS platform from Mascoma Technologies, that promises to help financial institutions modernize without blowing up their infrastructure—or their budgets.
Built by bankers for bankers, Stratum is now officially out in the wild, with production-ready deployments and a bold proposition: You don’t have to rip and replace to compete in the digital era. Instead, the platform enables community banks, credit unions, and regional FIs to integrate new systems alongside old ones, run dual cores in parallel, and unify siloed data into a single real-time source of truth.
Not a Replacement. A Strategy.
“This platform doesn’t ask FIs to start over—it lets them move forward,” said Dan McGee, COO of Mascoma Technologies. That positioning couldn’t be more timely. With cloud-native fintech players nipping at their heels, and core banking vendors slow to adapt, many institutions are stuck in limbo: modernize and risk instability, or wait and risk irrelevance.
Stratum introduces a third option—phased modernization. Its intelligent data hub enables bi-directional data flow across legacy and next-gen platforms, eliminating the historical pain points of core conversions: downtime, disconnected systems, and customer churn.
Built to Solve a Real Problem
Stratum’s origin story reads more like a fintech startup than a bank initiative. When Mascoma Bank, a $2.9 billion institution in Northern New England, found its outdated tech throttling innovation, it didn’t go shopping—it went building. By spinning up a tech subsidiary, Mascoma Technologies, and assembling a team of engineers and bankers, the bank developed a platform that’s now getting national attention.
Initially deployed internally, Stratum has since migrated to its own standalone infrastructure. That transition—typically fraught with service interruptions—was handled with zero customer downtime, thanks to Stratum’s dual-core architecture. It’s not just marketing spin; the resilience is baked in.
Integration as a Core Feature, Not a Pain Point
In today’s API economy, platforms live or die by their ability to play nice with others. Stratum is already proving its interoperability through integrations with fintech providers like LoanPro and Thought Machine. LoanPro CMO Colton Pond called the decision to integrate with Stratum “obvious,” pointing to the team’s firsthand understanding of what banks actually need.
This focus on open architecture and extensibility makes Stratum stand out in a sea of closed, vendor-locked ecosystems. The platform is AI-ready, cloud-native, and built for scale—buzzwords, sure, but backed by working code and real-world deployments.
The Bigger Picture: A Platform Strategy for Banking’s Middle Tier
Core banking disruption has been long promised but slow delivered. Most modernization plays have targeted either giant incumbents or fast-moving neobanks. What’s been missing is a solution tailored for mid-sized institutions—those too complex for lightweight solutions but too constrained to bet the farm on big-bang conversions.
Stratum fills that gap. It brings the agility of modern SaaS to community-focused institutions, without asking them to abandon what already works. It’s modular, configurable, and designed to evolve—exactly what banking leaders say they want but rarely find in practice.
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