Building an award-winning SaaS solution for banks, Ségolène Demoulin, Chief Product Officer, Skaleet

By Robin Amlot

Ségolène Demoulin, Chief Product Officer at French BankTech provider Skaleet offers her insights into the company’s successes at the Global FinTech Innovation Awards

Skaleet aims to ‘(re)build banks’, bringing speed and control to BankTech with a NextGen technology platform. Indeed, the firm featured as a winner not once but twice in the latest Global FinTech Innovation Awards:
• Best Core Banking Implementation: Best Tool & Practices Adopted (with NiuPay)
• Best Payment Hub/Wholesale Payments Implementation: Best Program Vision (with Score & Secure Payment)

IBS Intelligence spoke with Skaleet’s Chief Product Officer, Ségolène Demoulin, beginning by asking her what she feels made these projects stand out?

“We’re incredibly proud of these awards because they show our commitment to innovation, efficiency, and customer-centric solutions.

“The first award, Best Core Banking Implementation: Best Tool & Practices Adopted, was in collaboration with NiuPay. What really made this project stand out was our Process Automation (SPA) solution. By leveraging a low-code and no-code approach, we provided NiuPay with a highly flexible and scalable system that allows them to personalise services to their customers without excessive IT investments.

“The second award, Best Payment Hub/Wholesale Payments Implementation: Best Program Vision, was for our work with Score & Secure Payment (SSP). Here, our focus was on creating an efficient and scalable payments platform that not only streamlined merchant account management but also provided direct access to the SEPA network while ensuring full compliance with AML regulations. The speed of implementation and cost-effectiveness of our SaaS-based approach really impressed the judges, as it demonstrated how financial institutions can quickly modernise without massive infrastructure costs.”

What key trends do you see in European core banking?

“As we look across the European banking landscape in 2025, it’s clear that core banking is in the midst of a meaningful shift. Institutions are moving steadily away from rigid, legacy infrastructure toward more flexible, cloud-native cores that allow for greater adaptability and long-term resilience. We’re seeing a strong demand for modular architectures that enable banks and FinTechs to respond more quickly to evolving customer expectations and regulatory requirements. Regulations like PSD3 and DORA are pushing the industry to prioritise interoperability, security, and operational resilience from the ground up.

“At Skaleet, we’re observing that banks are not just modernising for the sake of technology, but to create the operational agility needed to thrive in an increasingly complex environment. This year we see 22% of product leaders in banking not just continuing their investments in upgrading legacy modernisation but accelerating it. The emphasis now is on building systems that can evolve with the market, not just keep pace.”

What is the importance of an API-first structure and what is Skaleet doing differently than its competitors?

“An API-first architecture is key for three main reasons. First, it enforces true modularity, ensuring that each service component is independently deployable and can evolve without disrupting the broader system. Second, it accelerates integration with specialised partners, allowing institutions to enrich their offerings while concentrating on their unique value propositions. Third, it enhances and long-term resilience. We’re seeing a strong demand for modular architectures that enable banks and FinTechs to respond more quickly to evolving customer expectations and regulatory requirements. Regulations like PSD3 and DORA are pushing the industry to prioritise interoperability, security, and operational resilience from the ground up.

“At Skaleet, we’re observing that banks are not just modernising for the sake of technology, but to create the operational agility needed to thrive in an increasingly complex environment. This year we see 22% of product leaders in banking not just continuing their investments in upgrading legacy modernisation but accelerating it. The emphasis now is on building systems that can evolve with the market, not just keep pace.”

What is the importance of an API-first structure and what is Skaleet doing differently than its competitors?

“An API-first architecture is key for three main reasons. First, it enforces true modularity, ensuring that each service component is independently deployable and can evolve without disrupting the broader system. Second, it accelerates integration with specialised partners, allowing institutions to enrich their offerings while concentrating on their unique value propositions. Third, it enhances scalability and agility, enabling rapid experimentation, testing, and refinement of individual components without requiring full-system changes.

“We’ve designed our service components along the BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) framework because it provides a standardised, value-oriented, and interoperable structure that
simplifies integration between banking components. This approach not only enhances agility and scalability, but also helps make sure our architecture is and remains aligned with the needs of the markets we are in.”

“By relying on clearly defined and reusable business services, Skaleet offers a true competitive edge accelerating time-to-market, fostering innovation, and strengthening compliance alongside evolving regulatory requirements and customer expectations.”

How is AI changing core banking?

“AI is rapidly transforming core banking, but the first and often biggest challenge for banks is gaining access to their own data in a usable form. Legacy systems often silo information, making it difficult to unify customer data across channels. Once this hurdle is addressed, AI becomes a powerful tool across the banking value chain. As an example, our partners focused on fraud prevention, like SumSub and ComplyAdvantage, detect anomalies in real time, flagging suspicious activity before it impacts customers. Similarly, AI-powered pricing is emerging, enabling more dynamic and personalised product offers, adjusted to customer behaviour and market conditions instantly.

“Beyond risk and pricing, AI is also reshaping how banks engage with customers. Intelligent systems are being used to identify early signs of drop-off or churn, allowing teams to proactively step in with tailored retention strategies. Chatbots, once limited to basic support, are now streamlining onboarding flows guiding users through processes with gamified, conversational experiences that improve conversion. Internally, AI is being integrated into business intelligence tools, helping banks make faster, more informed decisions by surfacing trends and insights that would otherwise be buried in data. Together, these advancements are making core banking more responsive, proactive, and customer-centric.”

In the past, banks were faced with the build versus buy choice but now there is the potential of a hybrid approach – how does that work?

“Traditionally, financial institutions had to choose between building in-house systems which are costly and time-consuming or buying offthe- shelf solutions that often lacked flexibility. Skaleet offers a hybrid approach that combines the best of both – a modular, cloud-native core banking with the ability to customise and integrate with preferred local partners and ecosystems. This allows institutions to accelerate time-to-market while maintaining control and adaptability.

“KongaPay’s journey with Skaleet is a prime example. Faced with the need to scale rapidly as one of Nigeria’s leading online marketplaces, they migrated 50,000 accounts and 2 million transactions from an in-house system to Skaleet all while future-proofing their tech stack. Since the migration, they’ve seen a 15% increase in MoM transactions, and grew their customer base by 20% in the first 6 months. We dedicated a full customer story to explain how KongaPay leveraged our hybrid model to scale efficiently.”

At what point does a company consider moving their core banking model from BaaS to SaaS?

“The BaaS model has seen an uptick in recent years as it allows companies to leverage existing banking infrastructure and compliance frameworks to get to market quickly. However, as these companies scale, they may encounter limitations such as reduced autonomy in product development, challenges in differentiation due to standardised offerings, and burdensome costs because of the pricing models.

“Moving to SaaS is a strategic decision that often occurs when the BaaS offering is becoming commoditised resulting in shrinking margins and or plateauing / declining growth in new clients. Alternatively, it can occur when the company is actually growing but the BaaS Core offering does not evolve as rapidly as it does, clients are demanding for more and the company is locked.

“A great example of the shift from BaaS to SaaS is our customer, Helios. Founded in 2020, this French green neobank launched with the support of a German BaaS provider. However, the team quickly encountered several limitations: the lack of flexibility, poorly controlled costs and the inability to issue French IBANs.

“In just 6 months, and without service interruption, Helios migrated to Skaleet’s SaaS solution, internalising its banking operations while securing a partnership with a licensed financial institution. The migration had immediate impact, tripling customer acquisition and doubling gross margin.”

You’ve grown with the company since the early days. Can you share more about your journey at Skaleet?

“I started out as our first Product Manager at a time when we were focused solely on the African market, which was a highly monolithic environment. Over time and as we’ve expanded into Europe, the demands of the platform evolved and so did the need for a more modular, scalable product.

“Today, as CPO, I lead a diverse team organised around the BIAN components, ensuring that our structure closely aligns with the architecture of our product. The way we design and build the product mirrors the communication flow within the team, breaking down silos and promoting collaboration across squads. While this strong foundation enables us to advance effectively along our roadmap, it is essential that we always focus on the customer value streams, ensuring that our product evolution is tightly connected to delivering even greater value to our users.”