Core banking modernisation has always been a practical execution problem. Banks, fintechs and embedded finance providers all want faster product launches, real-time processing, stronger control and lower operating complexity. Delivering that without creating another fragmented technology stack is the hard part.
Skaleet wins the award for Europe’s best core banking solution thanks to its sharp focus: a next-generation, European-focused core built around speed, configurability, payments depth and controlled scalability.
Rather than pursuing global category leadership, Skaleet has focused on Europe, where banking infrastructure is shaped by national regulation, local schemes, data residency expectations and different operating models.
“We are really after the category leadership for next-gen core banking in Europe,” says Martin Della Chiesa, Skaleet’s chief executive. “We do not believe there is really a global market in terms of product and solutions with regards to banking technology, given the regulatory pressure that is mostly localised.”
That choice gives Skaleet a clear product boundary. Europe’s complexity is not treated as an implementation problem but as the market condition around which the platform has been built.
“We are honing our craft with regards to the fragmentation of the European market,” says Della Chiesa. “We had to do a lot of work around configurability and connectivity in order to matter.”
The company now has more than 30 enterprise clients in more than 10 European countries and a team of over 120. Its target market is similarly defined: traditional banks launching digital businesses, regulated fintechs moving away from BaaS dependency, embedded finance providers building licensed operations, and small to mid-sized banks seeking a controlled route out of legacy systems.
Solution, not just platform
The next-generation core banking market is crowded with vendors promising modern architecture. Skaleet’s distinction is that it does not position itself mainly as a toolkit for engineers.
“We are more of a solution than a platform,” says Della Chiesa. “We are more like a configurable product for people to get started way quicker in terms of time to market.” That is commercially important. More than a cleaner architecture, banks need a core they can configure, operate and launch from without turning every deployment into a multi-year development programme.
For established banks, Skaleet is often used to launch a new product, segment or geography. For smaller institutions, the proposition is more fundamental.
“If you are a small bank between 100,000 and two million customers, stuck in the legacy trap, we are a way to transition out from legacy to modernity with some control over it,” says Della Chiesa.
Payments at the centre
Skaleet’s strongest product differentiation is payments – it provided the core technology that lets licensed institutions manage money movement, accounts, compliance, reconciliation and accounting in one connected architecture.
“We do not process payments,” says Della Chiesa. “We do not hold any regulated money. We are the tech backbone enabling it.”
Its payment engine supports SEPA, SEPA Instant, Swift and direct debit, with native ISO 20022 processing. In 2025, Skaleet made a deliberate, significant investment in this standalone deployment – decoupling the payment engine from the full banking core. The move reflects a clear strategic choice: to address a new client segment for whom payments are the primary need. Rather than requiring institutions to adopt the entire platform, Skaleet now lets them plug the payment engine directly into their existing systems as a dedicated payment hub.
The disruptors buy from us because we bring banking expertise. The banks buy from us because we bring the agility and digital nativeness that comes from the fintech world
Martin Della Chiesa
That gives Skaleet relevance beyond conventional retail banks. A payment service provider, neobank, corporate platform or embedded finance provider may need IBAN issuance, account structures, payment orchestration, monitoring and auditability – without replacing their core. Skaleet is built for that broader regulated money movement problem and by productising the payment engine, it now meets these payment-focused institutions’ exact needs.
In 2025, the company also strengthened this part of the platform with smart routing, verification of payee, recurring payments, cheque management, Transactis connectivity for instant payments and TARGET2 connectivity for large-value payments. These developments improve execution reliability, reduce fraud and misdirected transfers, and help clients adapt to European payment regulation without rebuilding the core.
Skaleet’s functional centre of gravity is retail and SME banking, especially accounts, payments and savings. It does support some corporate banking use cases but does not claim to be a deep specialist in every form of credit.
“Retail banking is really our sweet spot,” says Della Chiesa, “and retail payments and SME banking.”
Two developments stood out over the past year. The first was the release of a savings module that can support European products, including regulated deposits, interest calculation and accounting flows. The second was native multi-entity architecture, allowing clients to run several legal entities, countries or business lines on the same platform while keeping accounting, users, products and regulatory requirements separate.
That is particularly relevant in Europe, where cross-border expansion often means different schemes, reporting obligations and local controls. Skaleet’s architecture allows those differences to be managed without separate core deployments.
The company also protects product integrity through a single code base and regular releases. Client-specific requirements are handled through APIs, integration partners or Skaleet Process Automation.
Delivery, across Europe
Client evidence supports the positioning. Crédit Agricole built a pan-European digital savings platform on Skaleet, running the core across onboarding, payment accounts, savings, a SEPA and SCT Inst payment engine and pricing. It went live in Germany in eight months and will reach four countries by the end of 2026, with an ambition to collect €40 billion in deposits by 2028.
Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France, a 200-year-old mutual bank part of BPCE Group with over a million clients, used Skaleet to launch a corporate banking business in the Netherlands from scratch in under a year, spanning account management, European and international payments, savings, accounting and syndicated lending. Within months it had onboarded dozens of large corporations and originated hundreds of millions of euros in syndicated loans.
FDJ United, the leading European lottery player used Skaleet to launch Nirio in six months, combining bill payment at points of sale with a digital neobank offering French IBANs and cards. SDworx, a leading HR services provider operating in 30 European countries, went live in under six months with its HRTech embedded finance solution.
The next phase of Skaleet’s roadmap is centred on banking operations. The logic is simple: once the core product is mature enough, the next efficiency frontier sits in the work that surrounds it.
“Most of our roadmap for 2026 and 2027 is shaped around low-code, no-code automation and AI,” says Della Chiesa. “When our customers spend €1 with us as a subscription, they spend between €5 and €10 in operations staff.”
Skaleet extends the core banking platform with an operational intelligence layer built on two pillars: Skaleet AI Assistant, conversational agents embedded in the back office, and Skaleet AI Ops, which delivers a library of AI-powered workflows automating end-to-end processes with human validation. Both run on Skaleet’s core APIs exposed as governed, audited MCP endpoints, with models hosted in Europe for data sovereignty.
Skaleet stands out because it has chosen a clear fight. It is building a European, next-generation core for institutions that need speed, control, payment depth and regulatory adaptability.
Della Chiesa summarises the proposition well: “The disruptors buy from us because we bring banking expertise. The banks buy from us because we bring the agility and digital nativeness that comes from the fintech world.”
