Gregor Bierent interview for Forbes | NF Innova

Congratulations on a successful year! Can you summarize the company’s key achievements over the past 12 months?

The year 2024 was a very active and business driven year for NF Innova. Other than defined by the geo-political situation and economy, we managed to enter new markets and to expand our customer base internationally.  We are on a growth path, thanks to our built Software platform and expertise in the Digital Banking area. But 2024 was not only great in terms of new market entries, it was much more focused on the digital initiatives with our existing regional customers, which we supported for example to launch a junior mobile banking offering, dedicated to the youth generation, or the improved service offerings for their Micro-&Small Business clients and of course some strong preparation of new digital features to be launched early 2025. From organizational point of view, we managed to attract new talents, new minds and experts, which are already actively contributing across our growing organization.

Innovation is the foundation of your SW platform. How does your approach to innovation help banks meet the advanced needs of their customers?

I strongly believe that our unique approach for Innovation is shaping the future for us and our partners- that’s how we call our clients. We are striving to be at the forefront of market trends and technology developments and are combining that with our business and tech understanding to provide business value to our partners. With our internal innovation and Research and Development teams, combined with Fintech cooperation and our Partner involvement we manage to quickly assess the value creating and prosperous initiates, which we can quickly prototype and test in the market. If we succeed and business KPIs are met, we go ahead with a more detailed roll-out. Today’s tech and Economy world are requiring quick decisions on ideas, the successful proof (prototype, PoC, …) and last the power to implement and execute.

With clients on three continents, how does your company adapt its platform to the unique needs of diverse markets? What strategies have been most effective in building your global presence and securing partnerships with banks worldwide?

Our technology platform was built agnostic and modular, which the platform must follow.  enabling us to quickly adapt to local market requirements and regulations which the platform must follow. We re-use the fundament of the platform across all customers no matter in which country or part of the world they operate in. Only country and bank -specifics will be implemented in a tailor-made approach, but architecturally integrated in the overall platform. This allows us to seamlessly maintain existing services, roll out new product features, and implement technology upgrades across our client base without big impact on their business initiatives and plans.

Your FINTENSE platform is known for its innovative features. Can you explain on what makes it stand out, particularly in terms of personalization and customer segmentation?

There are several innovative features on our platform, but we see that banks efforts put into digital transformation are progressing constantly. Opening an Account online – without branch visits – or enrolling a loan product online are important digital products, but most of the banks have already implemented these. This year, we were focusing on segmenting customer areas, providing very personalized services and embedding non-banking services in customers daily banking interactions. So called “Super Apps” are enhanced mobile banking apps, which embed non-banking products or services- such as insurance, telecom or digital entertainment (eg. HBO, Netflix or Spotify) services, tailored to customer needs and interests. This way, bank customers can simplify their daily lives, having access to multiple important digital services in one app and can interact with the bank natively.

The concept of a Super App is fascinating. How does your FINTENSE platform integrate multiple financial services, and what value does it bring to users?

Super Apps and Embedded banking initiatives are enabled by the ease of opening up the “bank’s” applications to other technology services. So called, APIs are enabling a structured and standardized approach to connect different applications with each other. Open Banking is a regulatory started in European Region 2019 – which is supporting that kind of opening and cooperation between industries and digital services. Serbia’s target for enabling Open Banking is set for June 2025. We are proud that our software platform is already capable of supporting this mandatory service for banks. This means meeting the regulatory requirements on time is both easy and fully achievable for our interested banks in the region.

How does Artificial Intelligence fit into this? How does it improve the user experience and make a digital banking platform better?

AI has been a number one buzzing word for a while in the tech world, no matter which industry we look at. It has huge potential in the upcoming years and will change the world for sure. One area in FINTENSE where we use AI to create a bigger value is personalization. Based on the data we collect across digital channels, user profile, transactional data, geolocation, spending behavior, etc, we build the digital banking score per user. This digital banking score enables us to personalize the banking experience uniquely so that every user can have a different experience, banking offering, and interaction on digital channels. With the help of AI we can predict and automate the personalization and provide users the unique interaction on daily banking.

What advice would you give to young professionals aspiring to make an impact in the fintech industry?

There is a lot of young talent out there and the industry requires fresh knowledge, energy and new views on certain areas. Fintech is a very interesting area to deep dive and learn. Every citizen needs banking and there is a huge opportunity to make banking different and better than it is today. Young talents can shape the future of banking, combining the opportunity of revolutionizing As-Is with new technology, by out-of-the-box thinking and fresh solutions for both existing challenges and emerging problems. Technology is and will be playing a critical role of Fintech industry and its customers, Private Individual clients, Micro-Small and Medium Companies and Large Enterprises —spanning every segment of banking.

Your company has received several awards this year. What do these awards mean to you and your team?

Awards are a very nice recognition of the efforts and work we are putting into our initiative’s day per day. We are very happy that external analysts see the work we invested to build a state-of-the-art SW platform, winning clients and delivering high quality of service- standards that are not always common in the market.

In 2024 we were finalist for the worldwide Finovate 2024 awards, standing alongside players like JP Morgen bank or DBS bank from Singapore. Although we were not awarded the Finovate prize once again, we are proud to have received a strong recognition just a few weeks ago in Vienna. We were named the “Best Digital Banking Platform for SMEs in the CEE region” by the SME Banking Club and its members.

These awards and recognitions inspire us to take the next step—innovating, inventing, prototyping, and executing new solutions that continuously enhance value for our customers, who remain the key focus of our company.

Looking ahead, where do you see the company in the next two years?

The tech industry is changing fast. There are no five- or ten-year strategy plans in place like we had many years back. We see that we are involved and engaging in the latest trends in technology, we keep shaping our business knowledge further and our team is diversified. I would say that we are well prepared for the future- we will team up with more banks in the region and internationally, leading the Digital Transformation of incumbent banks in the upcoming years due to their trust in our team and our technology.

Source: Forbes SRB