In an industry where incremental upgrades are often mistaken for innovation, true transformation requires a shift in mindset. For Krokovay Károly, Founder of Informula Ltd., that shift came from years of working within the system, and realizing its limits.
Born in Hungary in 1970, Károly’s journey began with a passion for IT at the age of 14. He pursued system analysis academically and later professionally, working as a Systems Analyst and project manager on major banking IT projects. These experiences gave him a front-row seat to the inner workings of financial institutions, and exposed the deep-rooted inefficiencies that couldn’t be fixed with surface-level solutions.
By 2000, he transitioned into freelancing, offering IT consulting and custom programming for banks. Yet even as his work brought success and long-term clients, the real challenge remained untouched: modernizing an entire banking ecosystem from the ground up.
That challenge became the foundation of Informula Ltd., established in 2017. Károly envisioned a company that wasn’t just reactive to client needs but proactive in rethinking how banks operate in the digital era. Informula was born not as a service provider, but as a strategic partner—capable of driving full IT modernization through a multidisciplinary team of experts.
Today, Informula delivers more than just code or systems, it delivers clarity, efficiency, and innovation to banks ready to evolve. With a strong focus on collaboration, deep industry knowledge, and a future-facing mindset, the company embodies Károly’s belief that real progress happens when vision meets execution.
Because transforming banking is not about keeping up, it’s about thinking ahead.
Krokovay’s expertise and references have long been rooted in the banking sector, a natural focus given the digital nature of modern banking products. His specialization in this area aligns with the industry’s evolution, where IT has become a critical pillar of value creation for financial institutions.
While the term “data-driven” is now commonplace in banking discourse, “event-driven” has traditionally been confined to software development or IT integration contexts, such as event-driven architectures (EDA). The broader idea of an “event-driven business” has only been sparsely discussed, notably appearing in a single IBM video.
Traditional banks today are navigating pressure from two opposing fronts. On one side, they face fierce competition from digital-first or neo-banks, which leverage cutting-edge technologies to offer faster time-to-market and enhanced customer experiences. On the other, they must comply with a growing body of regulatory and supervisory mandates. Coupled with the accelerating pace of innovation and rising customer expectations, fueled further by technologies like generative AI, banks are being forced to modernize while still operating with legacy systems that are 30 to 40 years old.
However, a shift to an event-driven architecture does not necessitate the wholesale replacement of legacy systems, especially if those systems still function well. Instead, the integration layer must evolve. By introducing a data streaming platform and connecting existing systems to it, banks can begin the transformation process. Once successful integration is achieved, legacy components can be gradually replaced in a seamless, brick-by-brick manner, akin to changing a car’s tires while it’s in motion.
This streaming platform becomes the central nervous system of the bank, enabling real-time access to crucial events. But it goes beyond mere raw data. The platform delivers business-contextualized, actionable, and quality-assured information. Every business unit and system gains instant awareness of relevant events, armed with all necessary data to support informed decision-making. Since the true value of data lies in timely and high-impact actions, a streaming platform ensures that this potential is fully realized. Each business decision, in turn, generates new data and events, which re-enter the system and spur decisions in entirely different business areas, forming a self-reinforcing, organization-wide event-driven value chain.
Through this model, system functions and business processes become event-aware and decoupled, enabling each domain to deploy changes independently. Data silos dissolve, and events, along with their contextual data, emerge as reusable products accessible throughout the organization.
Perhaps the most transformative outcome is the ability to maintain a real-time, 360-degree view of every customer. Achieving this requires the continuous aggregation of event data from multiple systems. Such a comprehensive view not only strengthens fraud detection and facilitates hyper-personalized offerings, but also enables instant communication and ensures preparedness for future regulations that will demand real-time compliance and operational security.
The original vision for Informula was modest yet ambitious: to become a high-performing team capable of taking on increasingly complex and critical challenges. But for Krokovay, the driving force behind Informula, true inspiration lay in building solutions that could stand the test of time, systems that remained adaptable, allowing for quick, low-friction updates long after deployment.
More than a decade ago, forward-thinking banks began dismantling their aging, monolithic architectures in favor of more agile microservice-based systems. Sensing a paradigm shift, Informula proactively followed suit. Long before client demand caught up, the team began experimenting with and building solutions rooted in microservices architecture. This early start allowed them to gain deep expertise, and when one major client made the leap to rewrite their legacy system’s APIs and develop a new service layer using microservices, Informula not only stepped up to the challenge but led by example. Their leadership in this multi-year IT renewal project positioned them as one of the client’s most valued technology partners.
However, Krokovay soon identified a significant limitation in traditional microservice integration. REST API-based communication still resulted in strong dependencies between services, limiting the very flexibility microservices were meant to provide. As system complexity grew, the team found it difficult to tap into the full business value promised by microservice architecture.
The breakthrough came with event-driven integration. While this approach introduced its own set of technical challenges, it opened the door to building systems that were not only more stable and scalable but genuinely future-ready. Taking a bold step, Informula decided to implement an event-driven architecture, at their own risk, by integrating Kafka into a newly developed system. The result was a platform that scaled effortlessly and allowed for rapid, pain-free feature updates. This system is still operational today and continues to be a model of efficiency and adaptability.
This experience reshaped Krokovay’s understanding of software architecture’s potential. He realized that the value of event-driven systems could be exponentially higher if applied not just within a few applications, but across an entire banking platform. This realization led Informula to pioneer the use of streaming platforms within the banking sector.
The discovery of Confluent, a company with a global track record in streaming platforms, marked a turning point. Informula partnered with Confluent and began deploying its solutions within Hungarian banks. Their first deployment was soon followed by a second, with expanded capabilities and integrations already underway.
By 2020, Informula’s vision had matured. The company set its focus squarely on supporting the digital transformation of banks through the implementation of streaming platforms. The foundation of this mission now rests on three core values: reliable, flexible, and real-time. These aren’t just technical descriptors—they capture the spirit of Informula’s team, the robustness of the systems they deliver, and the tangible value realized by their banking clients.
One of Krokovay’s clients had recently launched a new mobile banking platform that relied on traditional REST API calls to retrieve real-time data. However, the system’s sluggish performance was immediately apparent to users, and it placed considerable stress on the source systems, creating operational risks for the bank.
Recognizing this pain point, the bank approached Krokovay to implement an experimental open-source Kafka solution, hoping to explore the potential of real-time data streaming. Krokovay introduced a Change Data Capture (CDC) solution that funneled changes from the legacy systems’ databases into the Kafka environment in real-time. As a result, the mobile banking platform was instantly notified of all relevant updates, enabling it to display accurate and current information the moment a user logged in.
While other solutions might have sufficed for simply forwarding source data, the bank’s vision required more. To display detailed monthly spending categorized by areas like fuel, groceries, and travel immediately upon login, data aggregation needed to happen in real-time, before reaching the mobile interface. His team knew the streaming platform could handle this, and the proof-of-concept validated their confidence. So compelling was the result that the bank quickly committed to a full-scale deployment.
The success of this initiative opened the floodgates for further innovations. Soon, the bank was exploring additional real-time capabilities, including CRM campaign integration, liquidity reporting, and merchant payment transaction processing, all powered by the same Kafka-based streaming backbone.
According to Krokovay, the most formidable obstacles in adopting real-time, event-driven architecture were not technical, but cultural. The greatest challenge lay in transforming how people think. Shifting from traditional batch-based, procedural methods to a real-time, event-driven mindset proved to be a significant hurdle for many.
To scale such architectures for robust data processing and ensure high availability, systems must be designed to operate redundantly and in parallel, an inherently complex approach that can be difficult to grasp. While IT professionals often adapt quickly, business analysts, designers, and IT leaders involved in development processes found the conceptual shift more difficult. Adopting this new model impacts every aspect of the development lifecycle, team responsibilities, documentation practices, operational procedures, troubleshooting methods, and even vendor selection, demanding cross-departmental collaboration in ways that many organizations are not accustomed to.
To help organizations adapt, Informula continues to invest in education efforts within client companies. These initiatives aim to turn the transformation into value-generating knowledge that benefits the entire enterprise.
The true benefits of event-driven architecture often become apparent only after organizations adopt agile methodologies. Practices that emphasize team autonomy, parallel workflows, and rapid, continuous delivery help reveal the strengths of an event-driven model. Yet, this transformation demands not only new tools but also new skill sets, ones that are still rare and expensive in the job market.
Building and sustaining a high-performing operations team remains a major challenge for many of Informula’s clients. While the company provides extensive support through training and collaboration, many clients eventually choose to outsource the 24/7 operation of their streaming platforms to Informula. This decision reflects immense trust, as these platforms are often mission-critical, in the case of banks, they serve as the organization’s digital heartbeat. Any delays or lack of expertise can have serious consequences.
This operational support has grown into Informula’s youngest business line, where the team is actively developing advanced automation techniques. Fortunately, the technology underpinning these systems has proven stable, with no significant outages or issues reported in recent years.
The team at Informula is highly committed to innovation. Krokovay, the founder, takes pride in the fact that they utilize the latest technologies in their field. This dedication is not just a corporate slogan but a core value embraced by every team member. It’s the spark that fuels their passion, the reason they wake up every day, to create something new and valuable.
Banks are becoming more receptive to new technologies, and Informula has been at the forefront of introducing these advancements. Each new solution they offer is built with engineering precision and transparency. They always conduct internal testing of new technologies before presenting them to clients. Trust-building is a key focus for the company, and their consistent track record of stable operations, coupled with rigorous testing, monitoring, and automation, assures clients that they’ve made the right choice in their partnership.
One of the primary reasons Informula partnered with Confluent was because their solutions have been successfully implemented at numerous international banks, with a strong emphasis on data security. The streaming platform enhances data integrity for banks by standardizing and centralizing data transformations (shift-left), ensuring that both IT systems and data analysts, or report users, access the same business data and context in real-time.
Informula is a relatively small company when considering the highly complex topics it addresses. Typically, companies with 20–30 employees are not entrusted with large-scale, bank-wide IT projects that span several years. However, Informula competes effectively with much larger and more well-known consulting and technology firms due to its deep expertise and unique, direct customer experience. This unique approach leads to one project seamlessly following another. Additionally, the company has dedicated knowledge and specialized teams for these areas, a rarity in the industry.
In recent years, Informula has begun articulating the core values that have been instinctively built within the company. These values now form the foundation for hiring new colleagues. If a candidate’s motivations and internal drives do not align with these values, the company declines the application, regardless of the candidate’s experience or skills. Their experience has shown that hiring someone not aligned with these values results in the team naturally rejecting them.
The company fosters a culture of embracing unintentional mistakes. Rather than assigning blame, they stand by their colleagues and help them correct the issue and mitigate any consequences. This high level of trust creates a sense of safety, which in turn encourages risk-taking, vital for innovation and experimentation. Krokovay now consciously applies the leadership principles described by Simon Sinek. The team thrives when motivated by inspiration, knowing that, together, they can achieve far more than they could individually.
According to Krokovay, event-driven thinking is not a novel concept in IT. For instance, websites are designed with this approach in mind, and event-driven microservices have been in use for years. However, the true value of an event-driven banking operation, built on a streaming platform, becomes apparent in business processes that span multiple IT systems and organizational units.
In situations where numerous system interfaces need to be built and maintained, where the speed of aggregated data is crucial (such as in mobile banking), or when consistency across systems and data warehouses is vital, this approach proves to be highly advantageous.
One of their clients, after merging several banks into a single new entity, faced the challenge of dealing with legacy systems and traditional integration tools. Despite these limitations, real-time synchronization between systems was critical. The unified customer experience demanded consistent product structures across different systems, which required coordination across several legacy platforms.
By conducting a proof-of-concept, the team demonstrated how a streaming platform could integrate fragmented data silos and deliver data in a unified, real-time format for business use. This demonstration was so compelling that it led the client to initiate the platform deployment project.
At Informula, the team stays closely connected to the evolving needs of their banking clients, ensuring a strategic influence on product development. Each team member maintains direct contact with someone at a bank, managing around 20 projects per client, with 5–10 people engaged on each project. This level of involvement provides both high- and low-level insights into client issues, often adding significant value by offering a comprehensive perspective of the challenges at hand.
The company’s approach often involves reframing requests to focus on the long-term interests of the bank, rather than creating short-term solutions. This sometimes reduces scope and immediate revenue, but the ultimate goal is to ensure the bank’s long-term stability and success. Informula strives to be a strategic partner for the next two decades, adopting a mindset that prioritizes lasting relationships over quick gains.
In terms of product development, Informula crafts solutions based on real-world problems solved at specific client sites. The need for broad market research or validation is eliminated. Instead, the company focuses on creating reusable components and solutions that serve as building blocks for future projects. This approach allows for the rapid deployment of a streaming platform within a few months, equipped with pre-built modules for security integration, governance, change management, logging, and operational automation.
The most profound lessons learned about organizational change management when guiding clients through the shift to event-driven business models revolve around a gradual and ongoing transformation. Event-driven thinking, though not new to business processes, has gained greater attention in recent years. Krokovay, who first encountered the ARIS Toolset nearly 30 years ago, has seen its use in SAP implementations where the EPC (event-driven process chain) was a core model. Even BPMN models have incorporated events to manage asynchronous control flows between domains.
Through extensive experience, it is evident that this transformation is not immediate and is rarely fully completed. One of the greatest challenges lies in the fact that banking professionals must increasingly understand the operations of their institutions holistically. This includes the systems, data, and tasks that occur both before and after their own responsibilities. Such an understanding requires not just technical insight but also a sense of accountability, recognizing that every individual contributes significantly to value creation within the organization.
In parallel, clients are undergoing agile business transformations that require a significant mindset shift. The introduction of streaming platforms and their governance has emerged as a common language for agile teams, offering a framework for understanding data and events in a way that fosters collaboration and consistency.
One of the most exciting innovations in event-driven architecture for Informula is generative AI. The team at Informula uses generative AI daily, focusing on practical, ROI-driven use cases that leverage their existing experience. It is clear to them that autonomous agents can interact effectively within event-driven structures. These AI-based agents require high-quality, real-time data. Informula is currently experimenting with connecting these agents to Kafka topics and embedding them within their event-driven platform.
At present, Informula primarily uses generative AI to automate internal processes. However, Krokovay believes it is unlikely to replace high-speed, deterministic, and well-tested processes, such as payment automation, in the near future.
Another exciting area is the evolution of banking itself. Informula is actively exploring new payment methods and business models. Observing his own children, Krokovay sees a radically different perspective on money and value creation, one that does not necessarily rely on traditional money transfers. There will be more ways to exchange value that could fundamentally shift how transactions occur.
Krokovay is still exploring the best way to ensure that Informula’s culture and mission stay true to its original vision as the company grows and the industry landscape shifts. Currently, the company is experiencing dynamic growth. During recruitment and onboarding, personality traits are assessed to ensure they align with the team’s culture.
This year, Informula has reached a crucial stage where there is a need to evolve and develop a more complex organizational structure. The company remains committed to growth and is actively looking for colleagues who can step into middle management roles while maintaining the same mindset. At Informula, leaders are expected to focus on making their teams more efficient, ensuring that team members enjoy their work, and inspiring them to follow. While delegation and accountability are essential, the emphasis is always on the team, not just the leader.
On a personal level, Krokovay hopes to leave behind a legacy of leadership through their work at Informula, both within the banking industry and in the broader movement towards intelligent, responsive business processes.
For their colleagues, Krokovay aims to be an example of how to build a well-functioning team capable of achieving significant accomplishments while working with joy and passion, giving their best. The key message is that no one can do it alone, everyone is needed, and no one is dispensable.
For clients, Krokovay hopes to instill the ability to think holistically about their organization and take responsibility for the entire structure. By always keeping the big picture in mind and approaching developments with full awareness of their complexity, Krokovay emphasizes the importance of agile operations. This mindset enables everyone to see and experience the impact of their work across processes, highlighting how indispensable each person truly is.
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