EP1009: Award-winning payment platform solution from Skaleet

This interview features an interview with Lina Mestari from Skaleet, a technology provider that recently won an award for its cloud-native core banking platform. The text highlights a successful partnership with FDJ Services, illustrating how the Nirio payment solution achieved significant growth in transactions and customer retention within months of launching. Beyond this specific case study, the source examines broader European banking trends, such as the transition from legacy systems to modular architectures that allow for incremental modernisation. It further explores the transformative roles of artificial intelligence and instant payments, which are pushing financial institutions toward more agile, real-time operations. Ultimately, the document advocates for a hybrid SaaS model, allowing banks to maintain reliable infrastructure while focusing their internal innovation on unique customer experiences.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Right now, you could you know pull a thin sheet of glass out of your pocket, tap a glowing button, and said a hundred euros to someone across the continent in I mean half a second.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Aaron Powell Yeah. It literally feels instantaneous.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Aaron Ross Powell Right. It feels like magic. But the actual computer systems moving that money, some of them are uh literally older than your parents.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Oh, easily. It's a massive clash.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Aaron Powell It really is. Today we're looking at what happens when this unstoppable force, the modern consumers' demand, for instant, 24-7 digital transactions slams into a 50-year-old immovable object.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Aaron Powell We are essentially watching the entire foundation of European banking just being ripped out and replaced.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Which sounds terrifying for them.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Oh, it's a nightmare for these financial institutions. Because they have to rebuild this infrastructure while the building is still, you know, fully occupied by millions of customers.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Aaron Powell Millions of people making daily transactions. Which brings us to the mission for today's deep dive. We are dissecting this really revealing interview from the January 2026 issue of the IBSI FinTech Journal.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yeah, the piece by Robin M. Loat.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Exactly, the managing editor. He sat down with Lena Mastari, the chief sales officer at Skelete.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

And just for context, they're a tech firm that just walked away with the best-in-class retail payments platform award at the GFIA 2025.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Right. And that is an incredibly competitive category.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Oh, for sure. It tells you Skelete is sitting right at the bleeding edge of this whole architectural shift.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

So we're going to explore how European banking is rapidly transforming from these clunky batch processing legacy systems to hyper-fast AI-driven platforms. And crucially, what this under-the-hood upgrade actually means for you as a consumer.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Because it does affect you directly.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Absolutely. Now, to understand the sheer velocity of this change, we need to look at a real-world case study from the interview involving FDJ services.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

La Francaise des jeux.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yes, massive entity in France. We're looking at the launch of their Nereo payment solution.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Right. So FDJ found themselves facing this very complex, highly urgent logistical nightmare. They wanted to roll out a modern bill payment service and significantly expand their financial offerings.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

And we're not just talking about launching an app here.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

No, not at all. They needed to deploy payment capabilities across more than 10,000 physical authorized FDJ outlets. Wow. Yeah. And on top of that, they had to provide customers with an account featuring a legitimate French IBON, plus issue both virtual and physical payment cards.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Okay, let me just stop you there to clarify something for the listener. Yeah. Because we hear terms like IBON all the time. Sure. And IBON is an international bank account number. It's essentially the universal passport for a bank account. But why is having a specifically French IBON such a massive hurdle for a tech rollout in France?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Aaron Powell Well, it comes down to trust and uh local financial plumbing.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

In France, utility companies, employers, government services, they often require a local domestic I bond to set up seamless direct deposits or direct debits.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Aaron Powell Ah, so a foreign one causes issues.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Aaron Powell Exactly. If a tech company tries to issue a foreign IBON, consumers face massive friction. Employers might push back on depositing paychecks, things like that. So FDJ needed a system sophisticated enough to integrate with the core French banking network.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Aaron Powell Not just some generic European overlay.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Well, that makes the timeline mentioned in the piece just absolutely staggering. I mean, Lena Mastari notes that FDJ launched the initial MVP, the minimum viable product, in less than six months.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Actually, it was just a five-month sprint.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Five months to stand up a massive, compliant financial operation.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

With a very small team, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

That's insane. And Sandrine Arizzoli, the head of product and design at FDJ, she's quoted explaining why this speed was non-negotiable. What did she say? She said 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 time frame. Thanks to Skelet's agility, we were able to launch in less than six months.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Yeah, and the time frame is one thing, but the downstream effects of that agile launch are what really matter.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Tell me about the numbers.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

The interview highlights that after this rapid deployment, FDJ saw a 50% increase in monthly transactions. Wow. Monthly new customers jumped by 30%. Nereo deposits grew by a full 100%, and they saw a 54% increase in repeat customers.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Okay, wait. I have to pause on those statistics because numbers like that don't just happen by accident.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

No, they don't.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

How does changing the back-end software, something the customer never even sees, cause deposits to literally double in repeat customers to jump by 54%?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

It's all about friction. I mean, in the old world of legacy banking platforms, onboarding a new customer might involve manual database checks, slow verification, and an app that, you know, hangs or crashes during peak hours.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Right, which is incredibly frustrating.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Exactly. But when you deploy a modern, highly responsive backend, that friction just vanishes. An account opens in seconds. A physical card request is routed instantly.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

So it just works.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Yes. When a consumer experiences a platform that actually works at the speed of their thought, their trust in that platform skyrockets.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Oh, I see. So they trust it more, so they use it more.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Right. They deposit more of their primary income, they come back more often. The back end directly dictates the user experience.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Aaron Powell That is such a fascinating way to look at it. The invisible plumbing dictates the visible trust.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Perfect way to phrase it.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

But how are they actually pulling off a five-month launch? It sounds like building a custom mansion brick by brick in a few weeks.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Aaron Powell It's not brick by brick anymore. The interview points to a fundamental architectural shift toward the cloud. But, and this is key, Mistari makes a very aggressive distinction between systems that are cloud native, which is what SkellEat builds, versus traditional banking software that is merely hosted in the cloud.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Wait, hosted in the cloud versus cloud native, aren't those the same thing?

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Not at all. This is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in modern business tech. Think of hosted in the cloud like taking a vintage DVD player and plugging it into a brand new smart TV. Okay. Yes, it's running on modern hardware, but the underlying machinery still operates the exact same way. It can only play one disk at a time. The software itself is still a rigid, monolithic block of code designed decades ago.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

It just happens to live on an Amazon or Google server instead of like a server in the bank's basement.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

So if that's the DVD player, what is cloud native?

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Cloud native is like Netflix. It's fluid software built from the ground up specifically to live, breathe, and scale in a distributed environment. It uses something called microservices.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Microservices. Break that down practically.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Sure. Instead of one giant block of code handling everything, the platform is broken into hundreds of tiny independent pieces.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Okay, so if FDJ suddenly experiences a massive spike in people trying to pay their utility bills on the first of the month, how does a cloud native system react compared to the DVD player?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Well, in the hosted legacy model, that massive spike in traffic hits the entire system at once. The monolithic code gets bogged down and the whole app crashes for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Right. You can't check your balance because everyone else is paying the bill.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Exactly. But in a cloud native system using microservices, the platform recognizes that only the bill pay button is getting hammered. In milliseconds, it automatically duplicates just the code for the bill pay function, spreading that specific workload across thousands of servers.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

Yeah. And the rest of the app like checking balances or requesting cards remains perfectly untouched and fast. And once the rush is over, those extra servers just spin down automatically.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

That's wild.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

It is. That's what the industry calls elastic scalability.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Aaron Powell, so it's essentially a living organism that expands and contracts based on demand.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Precisely.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

And because they're using this microservice architecture, European banks are fundamentally changing how they upgrade their systems, right? The source notes, they're moving away from full replacements in favor of modular architectures.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, they are actively decoupling their capabilities, which is the smartest strategy they could adopt. Trying to rip out a bank's entire core system at once is operational suicide.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

It's like trying to replace the engine of a car while you're driving down the highway at 80 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Great analogy. But with this modular approach, they don't have to do that. They migrate step by step.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

They keep a stable book of record for the account, so nobody's money just disappears into the ether, but they can seamlessly plug in these modern, fast fintech partner modules right on top.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

That makes so much sense. It limits their operational risk.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

And that hybrid approach finally solves the classic banking dilemma of build versus buy. How so? For decades, banks faced a terrible choice. They either spent hundreds of millions building a custom system from scratch, which was slow, risky, prone to failure, or they bought a rigid off-the-shelf system from a legacy vendor. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Which meant their app looked and functioned exactly like every one of their competitors' apps.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Exactly. But now with modular architecture, they buy the foundation and build the differentiation.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Okay, unpack that. Buy the foundation.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

They buy the non-differentiating, highly regulated components from a provider like Skelete, the ledger, the account management, the security protocols. That underlying plumbing just needs to work flawlessly.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Aaron Powell Right. Nobody chooses a bank because their ledger code is pretty.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Exactly. But they build the customer journey on top of it. They use APIs to connect their custom at interface to that solid foundation.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Let's clarify APIs for the listener. We hear the acronym constantly, but in this context, it's the secret sauce. An API application programming interface is essentially a digital waiter.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Yeah. FDJ's customer app is sitting at a table in the restaurant. Sculed's core banking ledger is the kitchen. The API takes the order from the app, runs it back to the kitchen, and brings the data back to the app without the customer ever having to walk into the back room.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

That is an excellent analogy. And because those APIs are so clean and standardized in a modular setup, the bank can swap out the menu items anytime they want without having to rebuild the kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

But this brings up a massive strategic debate highlighted in the interview. If these financial institutions are buying these modular cores, they have to choose an operating model.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yeah, the big choice.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

They have to decide between Boss Banking as a service and SAW software as a service.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

It is the defining operational question for any modern financial entity right now.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Okay, well, I have to play devil's advocate here.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Go for it.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

If I'm looking at BOSS, banking as a service, it looks like the ultimate easy button. It bundles the technology infrastructure, the compliance, and critically, it provides the banking license itself. Sure it does. If I'm launching a new financial proposition, I want speed. I don't want to deal with government regulators and massive compliance departments right out of the gate. Yeah. Why would an ambitious institution ever willingly choose the Sauce route where they have to take on the nightmare of operating under their own banking license?

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Your perspective is exactly why BOSS exploded in popularity for early stage startups testing an idea, but you use the word ambitious, and that is the key. Okay. Lena Mastori addresses this with total conviction in the interview. Boss is a rental model. You are renting the infrastructure, but you're also renting the regulatory permission to exist.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

And that speed comes with a suffocating long-term cost.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Suffocating in what way? Like just the fees.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

The fees, the control, and the margin compression. When you use BOSS, you don't fully own your clients or your business model. You're heavily reliant on an intermediary.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

More importantly, as your transaction volumes grow from 10,000 to, say, 10 million, your costs become totally opaque. You lose visibility into your unit economics. Every time a customer taps their card, the BIS provider is taking a varying slice of the pie.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

So by choosing SASCore banking, instead, the financial institution acts as its own regulated entity. They hold the license, and they're simply using Scully's platform as their technological backbone.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Exactly. The SAS model gives the institution complete ownership of their clients and pristine visibility into their unit economics at scale. They know precisely what every single API call and transaction costs them.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Which is huge for scaling.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

It is. It combines the extreme agility of cloud native tech with the strict governance and economic sustainability required to survive in finance. It allows the bank to stop pouring capital into maintaining a 50-year-old mainframe and instead invest that money into the customer experience.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

You don't want to rent the foundation of your house if your ultimate goal is to build a skyscraper. You need to own the land. And the need for that robust, fully controlled Sauce foundation is becoming an aholgency, right? Because external forces are dragging European banking into the future, whether they are ready or not. The interview highlights that new European laws are fundamentally changing the speed of money.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yes. We are looking at the EU's Instant Payments Regulation. This is the catalyst forcing the hands of every legacy bank on the continent.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Okay, let's get into that.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

The regulation mandates that banks offering Euro credit transfers must support SCTINST.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

And SCT INST translates to SEPA Credit Transfer Instant. For context for the listener, SEPA is the single Euro payments area. It's the network that allows you to send money across European borders as easily as you do domestically.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Right. And the instant part of that mandate is what's literally breaking old banking architectures.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Okay, because they can't handle it.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Exactly. The regulation requires near real-time execution, immediate verification of the payee, and round the clock availability 365 days a year. Speed and certainty are no longer premium features that a bank can charge extra for. They are the legally mandated baseline.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Let's look at the mechanics of why that is such a nightmare for legacy systems. Say you're paying a contractor in another country at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Okay. In the old world, banks relied on batch processing. The computer systems were essentially giant digital filing cabinets. Throughout the day, the bank would just toss all the transaction requests into a pile.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Just pile it them up. Then at 2 a.m. when nobody was awake, the system would lock down, process the entire batch of millions of transactions all at once, settle the ledgers, and open back up for business at 6 a.m.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

And here's the problem. A batch processing system cannot mathematically execute a transfer in 10 seconds on a Sunday. It is fundamentally incapable of it. Payments can no longer be a back office chore handled overnight. The tech shift requires payments to be a continuous, real-time capability.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

And it isn't just about moving the digital numbers from one account to another, is it? It's the cascading effects of that instant movement.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Precisely. If the money moves instantly, the liquidity management has to happen instantly. The bank needs to ensure it actually has the capital reserves to settle that transfer right at that exact millisecond. Oh. Furthermore, the fraud controls must operate in real time. The system has to check that 2 a.m. Sunday transaction against global watch lists, analyze the user's behavioral patterns for anomalies, and clear all the compliance checks and the time it takes you to blink.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Aaron Powell Which is just staggering when you think about it. And to make matters more complicated, these transactions are increasingly happening outside of traditional banking apps altogether. Aaron Powell Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

The embedded finance trend.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

The source discusses this rise of embedded finance, which is the concept of consuming banking services inside non-bank platforms.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

So applying for a line of credit directly inside a marketplace app while you're checking out, or managing a small business's cash flow directly inside their retail point-of-sale software. You never open a bank app, but a bank is still facilitating the transaction.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

And this is exactly where a solution like the Skelete payment engine proves its worth. Because it's a modular API-driven layer, it can act as the core engine for a traditional bank or it can operate standalone. Right. It can seamlessly connect these non-bank platforms to the major payment networks through sponsor banks. It basically empowers financial institutions to participate in these new digital ecosystems, meeting the customer where they already are without surrendering their regulatory control.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Aaron Powell And because these financial institutions are now building these instantaneous cloud native data networks, they've kind of accidentally unlocked the one thing required for the next massive era of technology: perfect training data.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Aaron Powell Yes, the perfect storm.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Aaron Powell Having established how these modular cores function today, the interview naturally progresses to what will run on top of them tomorrow. We are talking about the 2026 horizon for artificial intelligence in European banking.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Aaron Powell The shift happening right now is profound. AI in banking is graduating from, you know, experimental pilots and clunky customer service chatbots. Like those awful chatbots. Yeah, exactly. It's moving from those into industrialized usage at the very heart of the operation. We are seeing AI deployed for complex transaction monitoring, automated account reconciliation, and highly predictive fraud management. But there is a massive caveat that the industry is wrestling with. AI requires an AI-ready core.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Wait, why can't a bank just license a powerful AI model and point it at their existing 50-year-old mainframe?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Because an AI model is only as intelligent as the data it consumes. Legacy mainframes are notorious for siloed, messy, inconsistent data. If you feed an AI unstructured garbage from a batch processing system, the AI is going to make terrible, potentially catastrophic financial decisions.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Aaron Powell That makes sense. Garbage in, garbage out.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Exactly. An AI ready core, like modern architectures we've been discussing, exposes incredibly clean, highly structured data through well-governed APIs in real time. It transforms the bank from a passive digital filing cabinet into an intelligent, actively responsive platform.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

And looking at Skelet's specific product roadmap for 2026, they are heavily focused on this transition.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Very high.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

The interview notes they're expanding their savings module, advancing localization capabilities across different European jurisdictions, and strengthening their modular cloud platform. But there is one specific phrase Lena Mustari used that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. Which one? She stated they are preparing for agentic commerce readiness.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Oh, yeah. It's a phrase that signals a total paradigm shift in consumer finance.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Break the mechanics of this down for me. If I'm interpreting agentic commerce correctly, we're moving away from the era where you pull out your phone, log into your banking app, and manually transfer money to a high-yield savings account. Right. Instead, you'll have a personalized autonomous digital agent doing the banking for you behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

That is exactly what is on the horizon. Agentic commerce involves AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of users. Imagine a digital assistant that deeply understands your cash flow, your risk tolerance, and your financial goals. It detects that you have excess liquidity in your checking account on a Tuesday. Without prompting, it autonomously negotiates the best available interest rate across multiple modular banking APIs, moves the funds to capture that yield, actively disputes a double charge on your credit card, and pays your utility bill at the precise millisecond that optimizes your balance.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

It essentially becomes a hypercompetent financial manager living in your phone.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yes. But as the source material makes abundantly clear, for an AI agent to safely execute autonomous financial decisions, the underlying infrastructure must be bulletproof.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

You can't have the AI trying to negotiate a bill when the system is down for overnight batch processing.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Exactly. You cannot unleash autonomous agents onto a legacy banking system that might go down for routine maintenance on a Sunday night or one that processes data in delayed batches. Agentic commerce absolutely relies on the highly structured, perfectly reliable data and resilient cloud architecture that companies like SkyLeet are building right now. The plumbing has to be flawless before the AI can turn the faucet.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

It's an incredible technological evolution. We've traced the journey from FDJ deploying a massive 10,000 location payment network in just five months to understanding the mechanical reality of why banks are tearing out their overnight batch processing systems in favor of real-time cloud native microservices.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

It's all connected.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

And it's all laying the crucial foundation for an AI-driven reality that is arriving faster than most people realize.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

So the next time you tap your screen to instantly pay a friend, or you see a loan offer seamlessly integrated into your favorite shopping app, you know the reality of what is happening. You understand the hidden modular architecture that is dynamically expanding and contracting behind the glass to make that magic possible.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

It fundamentally changes how you perceive the digital infrastructure around you. And it really leaves us with a rather profound concept to consider as we look toward that 2026 horizon. If agentic commerce truly takes root in society, if these autonomous AI agents are soon seamlessly negotiating our bills, aggressively optimizing our yields, and interacting with banking APIs entirely on our behalf, what happens to our own human relationship with money when we rarely ever have to look at a bank account balance again?

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Wow. That is an incredibly provocative thought to leave on. The invisible plumbing might end up making the money itself feel invisible. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the silent revolution happening inside European banking. Keep exploring the hidden systems around you. Keep questioning how things work, and we will catch you next time.