EP1002: Building an award-winning SaaS solution for banks

This interview explores how Skaleet is helping modernize the banking industry through modular, cloud-native technology and flexible digital infrastructure. The company’s Chief Product Officer explains that Skaleet’s API-first architecture and SaaS-based solutions enable financial institutions to move beyond the limitations of outdated legacy systems and traditional banking models. The discussion highlights successful collaborations with partners such as NiuPay and Helios, demonstrating how operational agility and scalable technology can improve efficiency while reducing costs. The interview also examines the growing influence of artificial intelligence in enhancing data accessibility, improving customer experiences, and strengthening fraud prevention across European banking. Overall, the source presents Skaleet as a key innovator delivering customizable and compliant financial infrastructure that supports rapid digital transformation and long-term growth.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to today's deep dive. You know, today we are pulling our sources from a uh a highly revealing interview from May 2025.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Yeah, it was in the IBSI FinTech Journal.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Right. They sat down with Segaline de Moulin, who is the chief product officer at this French bank tech provider called Sculeet.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

And our mission for you today, the person listening, is to really use that interview to uncover what we call the invisible plumbing of modern finance.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Exactly. We want to look right past that, you know, that shiny user interface on your phone and see how banking is actually being entirely rebuilt from the ground up.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Because if you have ever tried to update the software on a legacy banking system, uh well, you know, it is essentially like trying to perform a quadruple bypass heart transplant. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Yeah, on a patient while they are running a marathon.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Aaron Powell Exactly. One wrong move and the whole system flatlines.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Aaron Powell But when you pull out your phone and you tap a screen to instantly open a new digital account or get a loan, it feels, I mean, it feels totally frictionless. It feels like magic.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

It really does. So today we're going to explore exactly how they are pulling off that magic without killing the patient.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this. Because to understand why this massive technological shift is happening right now, we first have to look at the immense pressure traditional banks are under.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

It really is a pressure cooker. And it's fundamentally a story of survival. According to the interview, we're witnessing this definitive industry-wide abandonment of rigid, monolithic legacy infrastructure. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Right. Because for decades, traditional banks operated on these massive centralized mainframe computers.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Aaron Powell Yeah. And right now, the entire European banking sector is basically being forced to shift toward flexible cloud native architectures. And when I say forced, I mean it. The regulatory environment is actively pushing this. Aaron Powell Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

I mean the interview mentions two massive regulatory frameworks driving this, uh PST3 and Dora. And for you listening, if you aren't, you know, spending your weekends reading European financial regulations.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Aaron Powell Which I'm guessing most people aren't.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Yeah, probably not. But PST3, the Payment Services Directive, basically forces banks to securely open up their customer data to third parties. You can't just hoard financial data in a closed vault anymore.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Trevor Burrus Exactly. You have to allow outside apps to interact with it safely, right, if the customer requests it.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Aaron Powell And then you have DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Right. Which is a mandate demanding extreme digital resilience against cyberattacks and IT outages.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Aaron Powell Because regulators are looking at these 50-year-old banking mainframes and realizing they're a massive systemic risk.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Aaron Powell Totally. You cannot just slap a digital patch on a half-century-old system and expect it to survive a modern coordinated cyberattack or expect it to securely share data with third-party fintech apps.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

The old architecture simply wasn't built for a connected world. And the numbers Segaline de Moulin brings up in the piece, they really highlight just how urgent this is.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Yeah. She notes that 22% of product leaders in the banking sector aren't just continuing to invest in legacy modernization. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Right. They are actively accelerating it.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

They are hitting the gas pedal because if they don't, they're just going to become obsolete.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Aaron Powell And you can see the results of this accelerated modernization out of the market right now. In the source material, Skelete recently took home two major awards at the Global FinTech Innovation Awards.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Which is a huge deal. And those awards act as a perfect lens to see what is actually working in the industry today. Like, for instance, they won best core banking implementation with a company called Neopay.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

But the interesting part isn't really the award itself, it is the insight behind how they won it. They use a low code and no code process automation solution.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Right. And low code is exactly what it sounds like.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah. It means a bank doesn't need to hire an army of incredibly expensive software engineers to write millions of lines of code just to launch a single new feature.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Aaron Powell Exactly. A product manager who just understands what the customer wants can practically drag and drop a highly personalized service into existence. It drastically reduces that massive IT spend that usually suffocates innovation.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Precisely. And their second award was for Best Payment Hub, which they did alongside a partner called Score and Secure Payment.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah. What they built there was this highly scalable platform that granted direct access to the SEPA network. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

And SEPA is the single euro payments area, for those who don't know. It's the network that allows for seamless cross-border electronic Euro transfers across Europe.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Aaron Powell But the critical achievement there was doing all of that while fully automating AML or anti-money laundering compliance.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Aaron Powell Which is huge because historically, anti-money laundering checks involve a ton of heavily manual, super slow processes that delay transactions for days?

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Aaron Powell Right. Nobody likes waiting three days for a transfer to clear.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Exactly. But I have to push back a little here and look at this from the perspective of the average consumer. Like, is all this modernization, the low-cools, the automated compliance, is this just tech leaders buying shiny new toys so they can win industry awards? Or does this actually change the fundamental banking experience for the person listening to this right now?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Aaron Powell Oh, it completely changes the experience. And the judges for that score and secure payment award specifically highlighted why.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Oh, really? What did they say?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Well, the industry is obsessed with this right now because of the speed of implementation and the sheer cost effectiveness. Traditional banking IT projects, they take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Aaron Powell And the customer always ends up paying for that float, right? Through account fees and terrible interest rates.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Aaron Powell Exactly. What this proved is that institutions can modernize rapidly without those crippling infrastructure costs. When a bank doesn't have to spend a fortune just keeping the lights on in their server room, they can actually pass those innovations, higher yields and lower fees, down to you, the customer.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Aaron Powell But that raises the obvious question: how are they actually pulling this off? Because earlier I compared updating legacy software to performing a heart transplant on a marathon runner.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Right. It's incredibly fragile.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah. If the old system is like a 1970s cruise ship, you can't just slap a bullet train engine on the back and expect it to work. The pressure will just blow out the pipes. So how are these new flexible systems actually constructed so they don't just collapse?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Well, the answer lies in what the industry calls an API first structure. This is really the absolute backbone of this entire financial revolution.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Aaron Powell And for anyone listening who hears API and completely glazes over, an API is an application programming interface. But honestly, forget the acronym.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Yeah, nobody uses the full name anyway.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Right. Just think of an API as a universal digital translator. If you have a state of the art modern fraud detection software that speaks Spanish and a legacy banking database that speaks Greek, the API sits right between them.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

It allows those two completely different pieces of software to negotiate a secure transaction in milliseconds without ever having to fundamentally change how either one is coded.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

That is a perfect way to look at it. And because APIs act as these seamless translators, they enforce true modularity. Every single service component of the bank becomes independently deployable.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Right. So if you want to update your payment gateway, you just update the payment gateway. You don't have to take the entire bank offline over a three-day holiday weekend to do it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Which used to happen all the time.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Exactly. It allows for rapid testing and refinement because all the pieces are isolated.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Now, to make sure all these independent pieces are actually speaking a language the API can translate, the interview notes that Scalit aligns its services with the BIN framework.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Yeah. BION stands for the Banking Industry Architecture Network. Basically, it's a universal blueprint for the banking industry, ensuring that everyone is building their systems using the same fundamental structural logic.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Aaron Powell Which solves a massive historical problem. For decades, banks faced this brutal dilemma: do you build or do you buy?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Right. Building your own bespoke system in-house is incredibly costly, highly risky, and takes years.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

But buying an off-the-shelf solution from a massive vendor gets you to market faster, but it is deeply inflexible. You're entirely trapped, restricted to whatever features that vendor decides to offer.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

But this API first, Ian aligned structure creates a third option, the hybrid approach. It gives banks a lightweight cloud native core system, but allows them to seamlessly integrate with hyper-specialized local partners.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

I actually like to think of this API modularity like a highly efficient commercial restaurant kitchen. In the old legacy days, the entire kitchen was one giant welded together piece of metal.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Sounds like a nightmare to fix.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Right. If the deep fryer broke, you had to shut down the entire restaurant, tear down the walls, and rebuild the whole kitchen. But an API first hybrid model is modular. If the deep fryer breaks, you just unplug it, roll a brand new specialized fryer into that slot, plug it in, and the grill next to it never stops cooking your burgers.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Exactly. And the source material provides a brilliant case study of this with Conga Pay, which is a leading online marketplace in Nigeria.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Oh, yeah. They were facing that exact build versus bywall.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Right. They had massive transaction volumes and needed to scale rapidly, but their legacy system just couldn't handle it. So they migrated 50,000 accounts and 2 million transactions over to Skelet's hybrid model.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Wow, that's a lot of data to move.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

It is. But because they didn't have to build the core ledger from scratch and they weren't trapped in a rigid vendor box, they saw a 15% month-over-month transaction increase.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

15% every month.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Yes. And a 20% growth in their customer base in just the first six months.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

But let me play devil's advocate for a second here. If it is really that easy to just roll in third-party APIs for every single function, a third-party deep fryer, a third-party grill, a third-party payment processor, doesn't a bank risk losing its unique identity?

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Aaron Powell That's a common fear, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

I mean, if every bank is just snapping together the exact same third-party APIs, don't they all just become identical clones of each other?

SPEAKER_01 10:05

What's fascinating here is that the hybrid model actually does the exact opposite. It enhances a bank's unique identity.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Aaron Powell Really? How so?

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Well, think about it. A bank's true value isn't usually found in how it processes a basic ledger transaction. Its value is in its brand, its highly specific customer service, its unique credit algorithms, or its niche market focus.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Aaron Powell That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Right. So by outsourcing the boring commoditized infrastructure to these specialized APIs, the hybrid model frees the bank up. It allows them to concentrate 100% of their capital and human resources on what makes them unique.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

So Kagape didn't lose its identity, it scaled its identity efficiently.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Precisely, because its engineers weren't bogged down trying to code basic database functions.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

That makes a lot of sense. You outsource the plumbing so you can focus on the architecture. And because APIs finally break down those isolated monolithic legacy systems, suddenly all that financial data that used to be trapped in separate departments flows into one unified space.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

And the entity that benefits most from unified data, the entity that just starves without it, is artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Precisely. The interview makes a very clear point here. The biggest hurdle for AI and banking isn't the AI technology itself.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

No, the AI models have been ready for a while. The problem has always been the data silos.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Aaron Powell Right. Here's where it gets really interesting. I've heard it described like having a genius librarian who speaks five languages, can read a book in a minute, and has a perfect photographic memory.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Sounds like a great employee.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Right. But the legacy bank keeps all the books locked in separate, heavily guarded vaults. The checking account vault doesn't talk to the mortgage vault, which doesn't talk to the customer service vault.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

And the genius librarian isn't allowed to see more than one page from one vault at a time. The genius is totally wasted.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Exactly. But once you use APIs to unlock the vaults and put all the books in one central library, AI completely transforms the financial value chain.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

And we are seeing that transformation across multiple highly specific fronts right now. Let's look at fraud prevention, for example. Okay. Because the system is API driven, banks don't have to build their own fraud detectors anymore. They integrate specialized partners like SumSub or Comply Advantage.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

And these aren't just basic scanners, right? They are real-time AI anomaly engines.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yes. They analyze the unified data across all your accounts instantly, flagging suspicious behavioral patterns before a fraudulent transaction ever even clears.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

And it goes beyond just defense. It changes pricing too. Because the AI can see your entire financial picture in real time. We are seeing the emergence of dynamic pricing.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Oh, absolutely. Banks can instantly generate highly personalized loan offers or interest rates that adjust automatically to your specific behavior and current market conditions.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

It also revolutionizes customer retention. These intelligent systems can spot the subtle early behavioral signs of drop-off or churn.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Right, like maybe you've stopped using your debit card as frequently or you've been browsing mortgage rates on external sites.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

The AI surfaces these trends so the bank can proactively step in and offer tailored retention strategies before you decide to move your money elsewhere.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

The interview also mentions the engagement side, which is huge. They note that chatbots, which honestly used to just be glorified, frustrating FAQ pages.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

The worst.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Right. Now they are guiding users through the onboarding process with what Segaline de Moulin calls gamified conversational experiences that dramatically improve conversion rates.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Okay, but I have to stop and ask about this. Are we sure people actually want a gamified experience when they are dealing with their life savings?

SPEAKER_01 13:46

It's a fair question.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

I mean, making a mortgage application feel like leveling up in a mobile game seems like it trivializes the very serious nature of people's money.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

If we connect this to the bigger picture, we have to redefine what gamified actually means in a financial context. It absolutely does not mean treating a person's life savings like a video game.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Aaron Powell Okay, so what does it mean then?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

What it means is removing the exhausting friction of tedious, repetitive paperwork. Gamification here means clear progress bars, transparent milestones, instant feedback, and conversational language that guides you safely through a highly complex regulatory process.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

I see. Takes an intimidating, opaque chore and makes it transparent and proactive.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Ultimately, it is about respecting the customer's time and reducing their anxiety, not trivializing the stakes.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Okay, so we've established how powerful this API-driven, AI-enabled architecture is. But how do growing financial companies like scrappy fintech startups actually get their hands on this tech when they are just starting out?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah, a startup certainly doesn't have the capital to build it themselves.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Right. This brings us to the life cycle of a growing fintech company. Specifically, the crucial leap from a BOSS model to a SAS model.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Let's clearly distinguish those two. Boss stands for banking as a service. The interview explains that BOSS is fantastic for a company that wants to launch quickly with minimal upfront capital.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

You are essentially renting someone else's existing banking infrastructure, including their regulatory licenses, to get your product to market immediately.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Exactly. So if an API is like a modular restaurant kitchen, Boss is like leasing a small stall in a giant food court.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

That's a great way to put it. It is super easy. The food court owner provides the plumbing, the seating, and the health permits. You just show up and start selling your food.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

But as these companies scale and become successful, they hit massive walls.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Right. Because in a food court, you can't drastically change the menu without permission. You don't control the dining experience, and you have to share your profits.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Exactly. In the financial world, botch leads to reduced autonomy and product development. You are stuck with standardized, often boring offerings because you can't change the underlying tech of the provider.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

And worse, you face burdensome cost structures that start shrinking your profit margins as your transaction volume grows.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

The Bosch offering just becomes a commoditized trap. Your growth plateaus because the botch provider's technology isn't evolving rapidly enough to keep up with what your specific clients are demanding.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

You are locked into their roadmap. So what does this all mean? Well, that is the critical moment when a successful fintech must transition to a SAS software as a service model.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Right. Moving to SAWS is like moving out of the food court and buying your own standalone restaurant building. You own the layout, you control the architecture, and crucially, you keep the mardins.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

And the source material does a fantastic case study of this with a company called Helios. They are a French green neobank founded in 2020.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah. They started out by launching with the support of a German boss provider to get off the ground quickly.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

But Helios quickly ran into those exact limitations we just outlined. As they scaled, they faced high, poorly controlled variable costs. They suffered from severe inflexibility in their product offerings.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And they faced a very specific, highly damaging regional problem. Because they were renting infrastructure from a German provider, they were unable to issue French IBANs to their French customers.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

And for you listening, an IBAN is your international bank account number. If you live and work in Paris and your bank gives you a German IBAN, it creates massive daily friction.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Oh, yeah, your French employer's payroll system might reject it, or your local gym might not accept it for a direct debit. It is a terrible customer experience.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

So Helios decides to make the leap. They migrate to Skelet's Sauce solution, internalizing their banking operations and securing their own direct partnership with a licensed financial institution to get those French IBMs.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

And they did all of this in just six months.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

The result was staggering. They tripled their customer acquisition and doubled their gross margin.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

It really is a phenomenal success story of scaling.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

But hold on a second. Migrating an entire bank's operations, people's actual life savings, their daily direct deposits, their auto payments in just six months. And the interview says they did it with zero service interruption for the end user.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

That's what they said.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

That sounds terrifyingly risky. How on earth do you pull off a live database migration of that magnitude without causing a total operational catastrophe?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

This raises an important question about the intersection of technology and human organization. And the secret to pulling off that seamless migration actually lies in Segaline de Moulin's own personal journey at Sculate.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Oh, really? How so?

SPEAKER_01 18:42

She started out as their very first product manager when the company was focused solely on the African market, which she describes as a highly monolithic single block environment back then. But as they expanded into the highly complex European market, the software platform had to become entirely modular and scalable.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Right. And she mentions that as the chief product officer today, she leads a diverse team that is physically organized around those exact same beyond framework components we talked about earlier.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

That is the crucial insight. It is a concept known in tech and organizational management as Conway's Law.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Conway's Law.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Yes. Conway's Law states that an organization will inevitably design systems that mirror its own internal communication structure.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Aaron Powell Wait, so if you have a rigid hierarchical corporate ladder where the marketing department is in a silo and never talks to the engineering department.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

You end up building rigid siloed software where the customer interface doesn't effectively talk to the payment processor.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Yeah. Segaline de Moulin understands this deeply. The way she designs and builds the Scalete product physically mirrors the communication flow within her human team.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

So she completely broke down the internal corporate silos among her staff.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Exactly. When your human engineering and product teams are just as modular, independent, and silo-free as the API technology they are building, executing a massive six-month migration becomes a highly coordinated, seamless reality.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

That is a profound business insight. The secret to updating banking software without crashing the bank isn't actually a software secret at all. It's an organizational design secret.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Precisely. The architecture of the business dictates the architecture of the software, which directly dictates the experience of the customer.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Exactly. When the team structure perfectly matches the software structure, you mitigate the chaotic risk. That is how you pull off a live heart transplant on a moving patient without the customer ever noticing a single blip in their service.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

It all connects beautifully.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

It really does. So to bring this all together for you listening, the core journey we've explored today is definitive. The era of the rigid monolithic legacy bank, the 1970s cruise ship that can't be upgraded without sinking, is officially over. The future of finance absolutely belongs to API-driven modular SAUS platforms. These are flexible systems that can seamlessly ingest unified data to power AI, instantly prevent fraud with hyper-specialized partners, and evolve their offerings overnight without you, the customer, ever experiencing an outage.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

It is a fundamental shift from a reactive, sluggish posture of merely maintaining old code to a proactive, highly agile state of continuous evolution.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Exactly. So the next time you pull out your phone, instantly open a new account, and receive a hyper-personalized loan offer that seems almost magically tailored to your exact life situation, I want you to look past the shiny screen. Remember the invisible modular API architecture making it possible? Remember the completely silo-free human teams working behind the scenes so that your money moves at the speed of thought.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

But as we close, there is one final larger implication to ponder based on everything we've unpacked today.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Okay, let's hear it.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

If core banking technology is becoming completely modular, hybrid, and entirely plug and play, if all the heavy lifting of ledgers and compliance is being handled by specialized APIs and Sauce providers in the background, will the highly trusted banks of the future even be traditional financial institutions as we know them today? Or will they just be our favorite lifestyle brands, social media platforms, or online marketplaces snapping together the best financial APIs to hold and manage our money?

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Oh man. Now that is a deep dive for another day. Thanks for joining us.