Kata Kamenski and Domagoj Mandaric talking with Guido Jurgens about the industry and partnerships
About Vestigo Cards & Payments
Vestigo is a payments technology company with around 150 employees, based in Croatia. Vestigo’s focus is on providing added value to customers across Europe through a strong payments proposition.
Data eXcellence
Data eXcellence is a Dutch data migration specialist with over 60 employees. DX offers companies data migration services throughout Europe.
Introduction
Kata Kamenski, CEO Vestigo. “We founded Vestigo in 2000 after already having considerable experience in developing software for banks. Vestigo focuses on creating software solutions for financial institutions. We started out with offering payment systems in Croatia. Now, we offer a complete solution for issuing, acquiring and payments“
Domagoj Mandarić, CCO Vestigo. “I love working with agile, dynamic, smart companies. Vestigo is such a brilliant fit for me. In this position, I can make full use of my wide international sales experience gained earlier.”
Guido Jurgens, CEO Data eXcellence. “I joined DX in 2016. We provide data migrations for European companies. A large part of our customers are financial institutions. We’ve done quite some work on mortgages, payments, pension funds, etc. Cornèr Banca was actually our first credit card migration. Vestigo provided a new card management system and Cornèr Banca asked us to perform the data migration.”
How do you position Vestigo in relation to its competitors?
Domagoj: “We see competition on 2 dimensions: a modernity of technology and functional scope. Established banks are generally served by older technology covering complex functional needs. On the other hand, there are many modern payment solutions in the market, but they are optimised for the needs of FinTechs or financial institutions with simple products and processes. Vestigo has the breadth and depth of functionality in a very modern solution. This is an attractive prospect for established financial institutions.
Further, we often see that card payments and account payments are addressed in different ways and with different solutions. We offer a single, convergent solution for both business areas. That’s also a point where we’re clearly differentiating from our competitors.
An additional point of differentiation is our comprehensive solution for profitably running embedded finance partnerships at scale.”
What makes Data eXcellence stand out from its competitors?
Guido: “Data eXcellence is really unique in its guarantees and its predictability it can offer to clients. Especially in the financial sector, getting everything 100% right is crucial. We provide fully automated migration solutions – which not only makes it repeatable, but also allows for quality controls integrated in the solution. Ultimately, our clients want a new system functioning perfectly with their existing data. Another aspect that sets us apart is our domain expertise. We have a deep understanding of financial systems and business processes. This knowledge is required to effectively migrate data. For us, it makes perfect sense to partner with leading software vendors in the financial sector.”
At Vestigo, you also provide implementation services. What’s your take on partnering with Data eXcellence in this context?
Kata: “Yes, we provide solutions covering both software and services. The experience with Data eXcellence on data migration for Corner Banca was very positive. Our strategy going forward is definitely to increasingly work with partners on providing services, including implementation services.”
Guido, you work with many software vendors. What’s your view on partnering?
Guido: “We talk to many parties – which is always interesting. However, we strongly believe that forging a partnership is not something you create without doing an actual project together. Only after a project is completed, you decide whether you really want to partner based on the integral experience. After we did the migration of Cornèr Banca with Vestigo, all the signs were green and we decided that a partnership with Vestigo makes perfect sense.“
What were your experiences in working together?
Kata: “The Data eXcellence people are really great to work with. That’s important, but not as important as trust. When there is a problem, the question is how to solve it together. To be fair. It is also about being able to trust your partner to deliver quality results and together meet the milestones of the project. In the end, the customer has to be satisfied with the result of the project, with what we have done together.”
Guido: “Like Kata said, it was great. It’s because of the fact that people understand each other, it’s all about knowledge and expertise. Second, we’re both eager to solve issues. We’re not playing a blame-game. We just go for the best possible solution.“
What is in store for the partnership in the future?
Domagoj: “We have quite an ambitious growth strategy. Data eXcellence is an important partner in adding more fire power to our implementations. Given the fit, the understanding of our data model, the shared approach, the trust – DX is our preferred partner for data migrations. In addition to Data eXcellence, we’re expanding our partner network with implementation partners.”
Guido: “For future projects, we don’t start from zero. The people at Vestigo and DX know each other, we know the Vestigo system, and we can reuse parts of the transformation between a new customer and the Vestigo system. That makes it even easier to work on new projects together.”
Thanks for this interview!