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|---Module:text|Size:Small---| In a featured interview with Executive Digest, Alexandre Feio, Head of Financial Services at Celfocus, shares his insights on the key challenges and opportunities driving digital transformation in the financial sector. From cloud migration and AI to customer experience and regulatory compliance, Alexandre highlights how Celfocus is helping financial institutions evolve, innovate, and build trust in an increasingly complex landscape.
Here’s the full interview transcription:
1. What role can Celfocus play in shaping the future of Financial Services? With over 30 years of Novabase's legacy in the financial sector, and 25 years of experience as a systems integrator, Celfocus has been active across various areas of industry, from core banking systems to commercial channels, supporting the digital transformation of financial institutions and delivering products in areas such as specialised credit, regulatory reporting, and asset management. Drawing on this experience and accumulated knowledge, we believe Celfocus is a long-term partner that combines technical expertise with business understanding. We can turn our clients' visions into reality by delivering innovative and tailored technological solutions. We believe that this combination of technical know-how and a client-centric approach positions Celfocus as a true catalyst for the future of financial services.
2. How important is collaboration between technology companies and financial institutions to drive innovation? We believe this collaboration is essential for the success of any such initiative, especially in an increasingly dynamic market. It brings together the best of both worlds – in-depth knowledge of the financial sector and its day-to-day challenges, and the agility and innovation capabilities of technology companies. From our experience, innovating in a close partnership with the business is almost always more productive and fit-for-purpose. Solving real problems gives innovation a more pragmatic character and ensures the solutions implemented have a direct impact on the business, making them more relevant to end users.
3. What are the biggest challenges financial institutions face in their digital transformation? From a technological perspective, many financial institutions operate with a diverse application landscape of varying technological maturities, which complicates even standardised transformation initiatives. The need to evolve while maintaining day-to-day system operations adds further complexity. At the same time, we’re dealing with a critical sector that impacts everyone’s lives, which means we must focus not only on technological change but also on managing change for our clients – and their customers.
4. What advice would you give to financial sector clients looking to accelerate their digital transformation? Invest in proof-of-concepts in an agile and rapid way, with the mindset that failure is an acceptable outcome. This approach allows for testing more solutions and identifying viable paths earlier. In addition to proof-of-concepts, an effective approach is Digital Overlay. This method enables progressive transformation essential for meeting time-to-market demands without disrupting ongoing system operations. By layering new digital capabilities over existing infrastructure, financial institutions can implement innovation incrementally, reducing the risks and costs associated with major overhauls.
5. What key technologies is Celfocus investing in for this market (AI, Blockchain, Open Banking, etc.)? Celfocus’s investments are strategically guided by the challenges, goals, and needs identified in partnership with our clients. We work extensively with AI in multiple dimensions and have launched some pilots and projects involving blockchain (e.g. an NFT platform for BPI). We are also leveraging established technologies that, when combined with AI, have gained new capabilities. One such case is the use of Graph Databases – databases designed to represent and manage relationships between data in a natural, fast, and flexible way.
6. How is Celfocus helping financial institutions modernise their digital infrastructure? A major trend in the financial sector is the shift to cloud infrastructure. We have worked on several "move to cloud" projects in partnership with hyperscalers, addressing both ecosystem configuration and monitoring. We apply Security by Design principles from the solution’s design phase through to delivery, as ensuring data integrity and business continuity is critical. Cloud financial management (FinOps) is also crucial – cloud costs can quickly spiral, often due to data storage demands driven by regulation or business needs. Implementing FinOps practices helps control spending and ensure sustainability. We’re also addressing core system offloading from mainframes to the cloud, migrating legacy COBOL, RPG, and other programs to distributed environments to reduce operational costs and increase agility.
7. How is cloud adoption impacting operations and innovation in the financial sector? Cloud infrastructures offer flexibility and scalability, with many services now available through Software-as-a-Service models that speed up time to market for new offerings. This flexibility extends to cost models, which become variable and align with business needs, easing adoption. In the case of Generative AI, this is even more evident – few organisations could invest in building their own engines in-house. It’s cloud availability that has made widespread adoption possible. However, medium-to-long-term business cases must be assessed carefully, as in some scenarios custom-built solutions are more cost-effective.
8. What roles do automation and artificial intelligence play in the future of financial services? Automation and AI are transforming the sector by enhancing operational efficiency, risk management, and customer experience. In process automation, the biggest benefit lies in streamlining tasks such as digitising paper processes, reconciling data, and processing transactions – all of which help reduce costs and human error. AI is already being applied in risk management, fraud detection, credit assessment, and market trend analysis, improving decision-making and transaction security. Generative AI opens new opportunities to scale these techniques, particularly through unstructured textual data. As Generative AI’s performance and accuracy improve, benefits will increase. In user experience, chatbots already handle daily banking tasks. With Generative AI, these agents will become smarter and handle a wider range of operations. Additionally, real-time data insights will increasingly be translated into natural language, giving users and professionals like account managers greater autonomy and decision-making power. Ultimately, these technologies are shaping a more efficient, secure, and customer-focused financial services landscape – though implementation must be cautious, as credibility and trust are paramount in this sector, and errors carry significant consequences.
9. What digital solutions is Celfocus developing for the financial sector? Celfocus is engaged in multiple domains: in data, building and migrating analytical platforms to the cloud, ensuring quality and governance to extract valuable business insights; in digital experience, carrying out incremental transformations using our low-code accelerators and frameworks to eliminate legacy, create multichannel solutions, and implement fully paperless digital signature processes; in AI, helping clients reinvent business models with a focus on customer experience, process improvement, and operational efficiency; in regulatory reporting, expanding the scope of our reporting tools to meet growing requirements (BdP, CMVM, AT, EBA, ESMA, etc.); in asset management, delivering solutions that reflect the evolving complexity of the market – from real assets like real estate to new digital assets and cryptocurrencies, and across business areas such as traditional wealth and fund management, pension funds, private equity, venture capital, and alternative vehicles.
10. Can you share a success story or innovative project that demonstrates Celfocus’s expertise? One example is D-Verse, a digital collectibles marketplace (non-fungible tokens – NFTs) developed for Banco BPI using Polygon’s multi-chain blockchain technology. Another is the use of our Asset Management platform (Celfocus AMS) to manage Portugal’s first cryptocurrency fund, operated by 3CC. We’ve also implemented innovative AI Ops solutions using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to enable operations teams to access complex information through natural language queries and diverse data sources. Our low-code framework has also enabled us to deliver solutions quickly and effectively, allowing clients to enhance services in short time frames.
11. How is the company helping clients improve the customer experience in Financial Services? Customer experience is a core focus across all our projects, regardless of the technology or sector. This is why our UI/UX team operates as a dedicated unit within Celfocus, with specialised professionals whose mission is to design optimal user experiences for every solution. Simplifying experiences is one of the most challenging tasks – especially in a highly regulated sector like financial services.
12. How does Celfocus support companies in optimising processes and reducing costs? One of our most successful areas is in going paperless. By digitising processes using our Intelligent Document Processing framework (classification and OCR) and solutions such as eSign (digital signature), we help automate activities, accelerate processes, and cut costs. These improvements also enhance customer experience by streamlining interactions and reducing turnaround times.
13. How does Celfocus address security and regulatory compliance challenges when developing financial solutions? Security and compliance are core components of every solution we deliver, especially in financial services. We apply a Security by Design approach, embedding security practices from design to delivery. Our holistic methodology is built on three pillars: processes – with automated pipelines and integrated controls; practices – including secure coding, SAST/DAST testing, and third-party library assessments; and culture – supported by an active AppSec community of over 150 members. This allows us to detect vulnerabilities early, reduce remediation costs, and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and DORA from the outset. We also invest in continuous training and promote a culture where security is everyone’s responsibility. Our goal is simple: to deliver secure, reliable, and compliant solutions that protect confidentiality of data and reinforce digital trust.
14. How is Celfocus helping clients overcome barriers to adopting new technologies? Technology change is an area where Celfocus has extensive experience. A key tool in this journey is our Facilitation Maps framework – a research and innovation approach to developing user-centred solutions based on quantitative and qualitative data rather than personal opinions. This method involves users and stakeholders throughout the process, using KPIs, UX research, and expert interviews to guide decisions. With Facilitation Maps, Celfocus and the client explore usage and requirements together, aligning processes and systems. This alignment simplifies communication between teams, aligns functionality with user needs and technical feasibility, and reduces the time and effort required for decision-making.
15. What are the most promising opportunities for innovation in the financial sector in the coming years? AI has opened multiple innovation opportunities in financial services, but models must be fed with high-quality data. The foundation for meaningful innovation is strong data governance and quality frameworks. Without this, AI cannot be used effectively. Thus, opportunities lie not only in harnessing the full potential of AI models but also in building ecosystems that ensure the right data feeds those models.
16. How does the company view the evolving relationship between traditional banks and fintechs? The relationship should be viewed as symbiotic. Fintechs, with their agility and lack of legacy systems, are more flexible and innovative, but they often lack the scale and resources to comply with strict financial regulations. Traditional banks that succeed in integrating disruptive fintech ideas, products, or services into their ecosystems will gain crucial competitive advantages in a rapidly changing market.
17. What is the key message you'd like to share with Celfocus’s financial sector clients about this strategic focus? Celfocus is a technology partner committed to building long-term relationships and embracing a cooperative model with clients, whether in Portugal or in the broader geographies where we operate (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). Our goal is to support them in both their technological evolution and transformation – helping improve the services they deliver to their customers – and in optimising their internal processes.
