How Zenus Bank Built a $75B Banking Platform on Tuum – and Won Celent’s 2026 Model Risk Manager Award

When compliance becomes the product: how Zenus Bank built a $75B banking platform on Tuum

Zenus Bank just won the 2026 Celent Model Risk Manager Award for Operational Resilience. Behind that recognition is a core banking engine built to go anywhere – and a proof point that modern infrastructure changes what banks can do, not just how fast they do it.

A new kind of bank needs a new kind of core

Zenus Bank is a US-chartered bank headquartered in Puerto Rico. But its ambition is anything but regional. In 2024, Zenus pivoted from a direct-to-consumer digital bank into the first U.S. B2B2C embedded banking platform – offering fintechs, EMIs, money-service businesses, and foreign banks in over 180 countries access to USD accounts, cross-border payments, and Visa card issuance through a single API.

That is a fundamentally different operating model from conventional banking – one that required a fundamentally different core. Zenus chose Tuum as the cloud-native core banking engine at the heart of its platform – providing the ledger architecture, multi-entity product orchestration, and high-volume transaction processing that global embedded banking demands.

Compliance as infrastructure, not overhead

The Celent award recognizes something important about how Zenus operates: This isn’t a bank with a compliance function. It’s a bank where compliance is the function – woven directly into every onboarding decision, every account event, every transaction.

Tuum sits at the core of that architecture. Working alongside NICE Actimize, Exiger, Onfido, Chainalysis, and Zenus’s own proprietary risk engine and orchestration layer, Tuum provides the real-time transactional backbone that makes continuous, cross-rail monitoring possible – across ACH, FedWire, SWIFT, card, and stablecoin.

“The orchestrator we built inside is the heart of the bank. It communicates with all systems. The uniqueness of this bank is the integration layer we built.” – Gabriel Viera, Chief of Compliance, Zenus Bank

The results speak for themselves

Within its first year of full operation, Zenus scaled fast – and its compliance infrastructure scaled with it.

What this win signals for the industry

Celent’s recognition of Zenus makes a broader argument that the industry should pay attention to: operational resilience isn’t only about avoiding failure. In the right architecture, it’s what makes new business models viable in the first place.

The correspondent banking model that has long gated international financial institutions out of USD infrastructure is slow, expensive, and retreating. Zenus is filling that gap – and doing it in markets that traditional banks have actively avoided. That’s only possible because the underlying platform can handle the risk surface those markets carry.

For Tuum, this is exactly the kind of use case we built for. A core banking platform should expand what its customers can do – not place a ceiling on it. Zenus is proof that with the right infrastructure, a bank under $1B in assets can operate at a scale and in markets that would have been structurally inaccessible before.

Congratulations, Zenus!

This award is a genuinely deserved recognition of what Gabriel Viera and the Zenus team have built. A compliance architecture that protects the institution, enables growth, and opens banking access to underserved markets around the world.

We’re proud to be the core that powers it – and we’re looking forward to what comes next.

Read the full Celent case study or learn more about what Tuum’s core banking platform can power.