Speed, Flexibility, Scale: INCAT’s Formula for Building the Next Generation of Digital Banks

Piotr Hanusiak, CEO of INCAT, on what it really takes to launch and scale a digital  bank, why core banking flexibility is the most underrated competitive advantage in  fintech, and the markets that are rewriting the rulebook. 

FFNews: INCAT builds core banking systems – what’s the real-world problem you’re  solving, and who do you solve it for? 

Piotr Hanusiak: At its simplest, we build the central nervous system of a financial  institution. The BOS Platform handles everything that has to work every time, without  fail – customer records, account management, transaction processing, product  configuration, and regulatory reporting. If you’re a bank or a fintech and you want to  launch a savings account, a loan product, or a current account, BOS is where that  product lives and operates. 

Our clients range from digital banks and neo-banks to fintechs and more traditional  financial institutions. We’re active across Europe – Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria,  Hungary, Romania – and in the Middle East, where we power D360 Bank in Saudi Arabia,  the Kingdom’s first fully digital bank. What connects all of them isn’t geography, it’s a  common need: they want to move fast, stay compliant, and not be held hostage by their  technology vendor. 

FFNews: “Move fast and stay compliant” – that sounds like a contradiction in  financial services. How does INCAT actually deliver both? 

Piotr Hanusiak: It’s only a contradiction if your architecture forces a trade-off between  the two. Most legacy core banking systems were built in an era when compliance was a  periodic exercise – you updated the system when regulations changed, and that was  fine because regulations didn’t change very often and competitors couldn’t move much  faster than you anyway. 

That world is gone. Regulators across Europe and the Middle East are updating  requirements continuously. At the same time, a new digital bank can iterate its product  in weeks. If your core system requires a vendor change request every time you want to  launch a product or accommodate a regulatory update, you’re already behind. 

Our answer was to build BOS as a genuinely configurable system, not a customisable  one. The distinction matters: customisation means someone writes code for you; 

configuration means you control the parameters yourself. BOS gives financial  institutions the ability to define their own product logic, their own workflows, their own  data flows – within a framework that’s already been built and tested for regulatory  compliance. And if new needs actually require software changes, you can’t wait six  months. Your system must be built so that changes can be implemented quickly and  without disruption to other system users, even on the other side of the world. So, speed  and compliance aren’t in tension; they’re both properties of the same underlying  architecture. 

FFNews: You work with fintechs across Central and Eastern Europe – Lithuania,  Bulgaria, Poland. What does a typical engagement look like there, and what are  those institutions asking for? 

Piotr Hanusiak: The Central and Eastern European fintech scene is genuinely exciting  right now. These are markets where digital adoption is high, where regulators have been  relatively progressive about licensing new entrants, and where there’s a real appetite to  challenge incumbent banks with better product design and lower cost structures. 

What those clients typically ask for is a platform that won’t get in their way. A Lithuanian  fintech or a Bulgarian digital payment provider doesn’t want to spend 18 months  implementing a system before they can talk to their first customer. They want to launch,  learn, and iterate. BOS is built for exactly that – we can have an institution operational in  a fraction of the time that a traditional core banking implementation would require. 

The other thing they ask for, increasingly, is the ability to grow across borders without  rebuilding. A fintech that starts in Lithuania might want to expand into Poland or  Romania within two years. If your core system requires a separate implementation for  each regulatory jurisdiction, that ambition dies quickly. Our multi-jurisdiction support  means that expansion is a configuration exercise, not a re-engineering project. 

FFNews: D360 Bank in Saudi Arabia is your most high-profile deployment. What  made that project distinct from your European work? 

Piotr Hanusiak: The scale and the regulatory complexity, in combination. D360 scaled  to 2 million customers in just 10 months from broad-market launch, and today  processes around one million operations daily. That’s a stress test that very few  systems ever face at that speed, and it happened in a regulatory environment — overseen by SAMA, the Saudi Central Bank – that is among the most rigorous in the  world. 

What made it work was the same thing that makes our European deployments work:  the architecture. BOS doesn’t have a different engine for big banks and small fintechs. 

The horizontal scalability, the cloud-agnostic infrastructure, the real-time processing – those are baseline properties, not premium features. When D360’s customer numbers  moved extreamly fast, the system expanded with them rather than requiring a parallel  re-architecture project. 

FFNews: Core banking replacement is one of the most feared projects in financial  services. What makes institutions finally pull the trigger, and what should they  know before they do? 

Piotr Hanusiak: They pull the trigger when the cost of staying becomes higher than the  cost of moving. That usually happens one of three ways: the existing system literally  can’t process the volume of transactions anymore; a regulatory requirement arrives  that the old system can’t accommodate; or the competitive gap to institutions on  modern platforms becomes too large to accept , and there is no simple possibility of  transferring the functions of the core system to other satellite domain systems. 

What institutions should know before they start is that this is a business transformation  project, not an IT project. The technology is solvable. The harder work is understanding  your own data, your own product logic, your own operational processes – often well  enough to describe them clearly for the first time. Organisations frequently discover  that assumptions baked into their old systems have become invisible constraints on  how they think about products and customers. A migration forces those into the open,  which is uncomfortable but ultimately valuable. 

The other thing I’d say is: don’t let the scale of the project become an excuse to delay  indefinitely. We’ve seen institutions spend years in evaluation cycles because the risk  feels too large to accept. Meanwhile, the platform they’re on keeps ageing, and the gap  keeps growing. At some point, a structured, well-phased migration becomes less risky  than staying put. The institutions that have done this well are the ones that treated it as  a series of manageable steps rather than a single monolithic event. 

FFNews: Saudi Arabia’s IT sector is estimated at $30 billion, and Vision 2030 is  reshaping the financial services landscape. How do you read the regional  opportunity — and where else are you looking? 

Piotr Hanusiak: 

Saudi Arabia is an important entry point, but our ambition is the broader MENA region.  There’s significant appetite for modern financial infrastructure across the Middle East  and North Africa – from institutions launching new digital operations to established  players looking to replace ageing core systems. We’re actively progressing several  conversations in the region, at different stages of maturity, and we expect that pipeline  to convert over the next 6 to 12 months.

Saudi Vision 2030 is genuinely significant because it’s structural, not a spending cycle.  The Saudi financial sector isn’t modernising because it has surplus budget – it’s  modernising because it has to, in order to support an economy that’s being deliberately  diversified away from hydrocarbons. That creates durable demand for institutions that  can provide credible, scalable technology and stay committed for the long term. We established a subsidiary in Riyadh, rather than Dubai, precisely because we want to be  genuinely present in that market – not just geographically adjacent to it. 

Beyond the Middle East, we’re also seeing inbound interest from Africa, where a  number of institutions are at an inflection point with their legacy infrastructure. The  problems are structurally similar to what we see in MENA – systems that were fit for  purpose a decade ago, now struggling to keep pace with transaction volumes and  regulatory expectations. That’s a pattern we know how to address. 

FFNews: What’s the most important thing a fintech founder should get right in their  first year of building a digital bank? 

Piotr Hanusiak: Choose your core infrastructure as if you’ll never change it – because  you probably won’t, or at the very least you’ll do everything possible to avoid it. The  front-end can be redesigned. The brand can evolve. The product catalogue will certainly  change. But the core banking system is the one decision that’s genuinely difficult and  expensive to undo. Founders who treat it as a commodity purchase, or who defer it  because the app layer feels more exciting, tend to hit a ceiling much earlier than they  expected. 

When evaluating vendors, the right questions are about architecture, not about  references. Can the system be configured without vendor involvement for day-to-day  product changes? How does it handle regulatory updates across multiple jurisdictions?  What does scaling actually look like – technically and commercially – when your  customer base grows tenfold? A vendor who can answer those questions with  specificity, and back it up with a transparent look under the hood, is a vendor worth  talking to seriously. Every institution is different. What matters is whether the platform  is genuinely built to adapt – not whether it has already served someone who looks  exactly like you. 

Piotr Hanusiak is CEO of INCAT, a tech company specialising in core banking systems  for digital banks and financial institutions. INCAT’s BOS platform serves clients across  Europe – including financial entities in Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, as well as D360  Bank, Saudi Arabia’s first fully digital bank, and a growing pipeline of institutions across  the Middle East and Africa.