Award-winning payment platform solution from Skaleet

By Robin Amlot

Skaleet won the award for Best-in-Class Retail Payments Platform at the Global FinTech Innovation Awards (GFIA) 2025. Lina Mestari, Chief Sales Officer, Skaleet, discusses what the platform offered to client FDJ Services (La Française des Jeux)

“We were delighted to win this award for our work with FDJ Services on the Nirio payment solution.
The solution we delivered enables FDJ to offer modern bill-payment service and expanded financial services quickly and at scale, including payments at over 10,000 authorised FDJ outlets, an account with a French IBAN, and a virtual and physical payment card.

FDJ was able to launch the initial service in only 5 months with a very small team, thanks to our cloud-native, easy to deploy core banking infrastructure.”

How has the platform performed since its launch and what do you believe makes it a winner?

“The results speak for themselves. FDJ Services has seen a 50% increase in monthly transactions and a 30% increase in monthly new customers since going live. Nirio deposits have also grown by 100% and they’ve seen a 54% increase of repeat customers. I’ll leave you with a quote from our client on why we were chosen and have been instrumental to Nirio’s success.”

“We needed a core banking system to manage payment flows: payments at points of sale and fund transfers to our partners. To validate the service’s appeal, we wanted to quickly bring an MVP to market and needed a partner who could support us within a tight timeframe. Thanks to Skaleet’s agility, we were able to launch Nirio Bill Payment in less than six months, and subsequently roll out new services, enhance existing ones, and continuously adapt to our customers’ needs.” – Sandrine Arizzoli, Head of Product & Design, La Française des Jeux

What key trends do you see in European core banking?

“In Europe, core banking is shifting to cloud-native platforms rather than traditional systems hosted in the cloud. Banks seek elastic scalability, faster deployment, and continuous delivery to reduce TTM and operational friction. This shift is less about pure cost savings and more about time to market, agility, resilience, and the ability to support multiple products and entities efficiently.

“Rather than full replacements, European banks are favouring modular architectures enabling incremental modernisation with best-of-breed solutions. By decoupling capabilities like accounts, payments, and lending, banks can migrate portfolios step by step, limit operational risk, and adapt more easily to regulatory or business changes. Modular cores also simplify integration with existing systems and FinTech partners while maintaining a stable book of record.

“AI in European banking is moving from pilots to industrialised use in core operations, customer servicing, and risk and fraud management. This evolution requires cloud-based infrastructure and high-quality, well-structured data at the core. Modern core banking platforms are thus becoming enablers for safe, governed AI adoption, helping banks improve efficiency, control, and customer experience without
compromising regulatory requirements.”

How did your clients use your platform to build a competitive edge in their respective markets?

“Our clients use Skaleet’s solutions to build competitive advantage primarily through speed, cost, and quality.

• Speed: Clients leverage our cloud-native, modular architecture to dramatically shorten time-to-market. By reusing standardised core capabilities and configuring products rather than custom building them, banks and financial institutions are able to launch new offerings in less than a year, which is a decisive advantage in competitive markets.
  • Cost: The platform enables a strong alignment of interests on costs. Our SaaS and industrialised operating model reduces upfront investment, derisks transformation projects, and lowers the total cost over time. Clients benefit from predictable and transparent pricing and economies of scale, allowing them to invest more in customer experience and differentiation rather than core maintenance.
  • Quality: Clients also gain a competitive edge through quality, both in technology and operations. Skaleet combines a robust, secure core with best-of-breed partner solutions to deliver a full turnkey banking platform, covering core functions, payments, compliance, and integration layers. Continuous improvements, high reliability, and strong security and regulatory standards enable clients to operate at scale with confidence while focusing on growth. It allows our clients to securely grow on our platform and serenely meet their users’ tomorrow needs.”

How is AI changing core banking?

“AI is increasingly embedded into core banking, shifting it from a system of record to a more intelligent, responsive platform. At the core level, AI is improving automation, data quality, and decision making
across areas like onboarding, transaction monitoring, reconciliation, and customer servicing, helping banks operate more efficiently while meeting regulatory expectations around control and explainability.
“At the same time, AI is changing how banks build and evolve their platforms. We are seeing a move toward AI ready cores that expose clean data, real time events, and well governed APIs, enabling
everything from predictive insights to agent driven interactions. At Skaleet, we’ve also got some exciting AI updates on our product roadmap that you can read about below.”

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

“With Skaleet, banks buy a proven, cloud-native core that usually covers the non-differentiating foundations, ledger, accounts, payments, regulatory controls, security, and resilience, while building differentiation on top through configuration and APIs. Product logic, customer journeys, partner integrations, and market-specific features can be developed by the bank or its ecosystem without touching the core.”

“This hybrid model works because the core is industrialised and continuously upgraded, while the surrounding layers remain open and flexible. Banks avoid reinventing critical infrastructure, keep costs and risk under control, and still retain full freedom to innovate. In practice, this allows them to move faster, comply with regulation more easily, and focus their build efforts only where it truly creates competitive advantage.”