Infinum: Why communication belongs in the blueprint, not the backlog
Željko Plesac of Infinum on why trust and communication must be built into digital financial products from day one, not added as an afterthought.
At MWC 2026, Željko Plesac came prepared to talk about something the banking and insurance industry rarely admits: the hardest part of digital transformation is not the technology. It is the discipline to build trust and communication into the product from day one, rather than bolting them on at the end. As Partnership Director at Infinum, a global tech consultancy whose clients include Porsche, Versuni, and Alfa Laval, Plesac has seen first-hand what separates the digital products that earn lasting loyalty from those that simply check the box.
Infinum operates as a full-service digital agency, taking products from the first spark of an idea through design, engineering, launch, and growth. That end-to-end perspective gives Plesac a clear view of where financial services enterprises succeed and where they reliably stumble.
From transformation to consolidation
The financial services industry has been digitizing longer than most. Banks went digital in the 1980s, and for four decades the sector has been steadily moving products and services online. But Plesac argues the sector has now entered a fundamentally different phase.
“Banks and insurance companies have been on the forefront of digital transformation for the past 40, maybe even 50 years,” he says. “Now we are in the phase where we are talking more about digital consolidation.”
The consolidation agenda is specific: take the full range of products a bank has on the market and bring them into a single app with a unified brand, unified communication, and a single point of entry for every customer interaction. The era of standalone apps for individual financial products is giving way to integrated platforms designed around the customer rather than the product line.
The expectation gap
At the same time, the baseline for what a good digital experience looks like has shifted permanently. Plesac points to a generation of consumer apps that have raised the bar for everyone.
For two decades, users broadly accepted the conservative, enterprise-ready design language of financial apps. Then came Uber, Spotify, and Revolut. These companies delivered experiences so clean and intuitive that customers stopped tolerating anything less. Now they bring those same expectations to their bank.
Customers are now asking for better user experience, for better design, for easier design. And they have the same expectation from their banks.
Željko Plesac
Partnership Director at Infinum
Trust is not a feature
In banking and insurance, there is a dimension of product design that few other industries face in quite the same way: trust. It cannot be added in a later sprint. According to Plesac, it has to be architected from the start.
The failure mode is familiar: permissions requested without explanation, data usage policies buried in legal text, biometric prompts that feel intrusive rather than reassuring. When trust is an afterthought, it creates friction at exactly the moments that matter most to users.
Trust has to be baked in all of the aspects of the product, and it needs to be baked from the beginning. Customers need to know why we are asking for certain permissions, what we are going to do with the data, why we need biometrics. It needs to be incorporated in the UX in a way that does not limit or block any users.
Željko Plesac
Partnership Director at Infinum
Where enterprises get stuck
When large banks and insurers attempt to innovate, they tend to hit the same three walls. Plesac has seen the pattern often enough to name them without hesitation.
The first is legacy technology. Some of the systems still powering core banking functions were written in COBOL or Visual Basic, and modernizing them is a years-long undertaking that runs parallel to every other digital initiative.
The second is regulation. “Usually the first answer is no to everything,” Plesac says, “because that is the simplest solution to all of the regulatory changes happening on the market.”
The third, and often the most stubborn, is silos. When ownership of digital products is fragmented across smaller teams and departments, the coordination required for genuine transformation becomes nearly impossible. Getting to a unified digital product requires organizational alignment that goes well beyond technology.
Communication is either in the product or it is spam
One of the sharpest observations Plesac offers concerns where communication sits in the product development process. Most enterprises treat it as a support layer, something added after the core product is built. That approach, he argues, produces a specific and recognizable failure.
The difference becomes most visible in high-stakes moments. Plesac uses a vivid example: losing a credit card at MWC. In that instant, communication is not a support channel. It is the entire product. The user needs to know what is happening, needs to act quickly, and if the experience is well designed, can resolve everything through the app without ever calling a contact center.
When communication is designed into the journey rather than laid on top of it, it guides users through complex flows, reduces anxiety at critical moments, and builds exactly the kind of trust that keeps them in the app.
When communication gets added to the digital product at the end, it is usually more in a spammy way, or in a way where they are just upselling marketing products. If communication is baked in from the beginning, we can really navigate the user better through the whole flow.
Željko Plesac
Partnership Director at Infinum
What the Infobip and Infinum partnership makes possible
This is precisely where the partnership between Infinum and Infobip comes in. Infinum brings deep expertise in design and engineering, building products with polished interfaces and strong user experience. Infobip contributes the communication infrastructure: the multi-channel capabilities that extend those products to wider audiences and make real-time, contextual communication possible.
“We develop products with really good UI, keen to the eye and really cool user experience,” Plesac explains. “Infobip delivers the communication channels where we can open those products to a wider audience. We can reach out to clients through the multi-channel support that Infobip is offering. All of that results in products that have a better user experience and that deliver better and bigger business value.”
The combination addresses exactly the fragmented, siloed approach that holds large enterprises back: design and communication working from the same blueprint, rather than being stitched together at the end.
What comes next
Looking ahead, Plesac sees AI accelerating the shift already underway in financial services.
The reactive model, where a customer reports a problem and a system responds, is giving way to something more proactive. In financial services, that means AI that can anticipate a need, surface the right action at the right moment, and handle it through a conversation that feels natural rather than scripted. For an industry still working through digital consolidation, it represents both a significant opportunity and another reason to get the foundations right now.
We currently see a big shift from reactive to agentic. Agentic AI, agents, conversational AI. Everything will become more fluid, more natural, and will open new business opportunities for everybody.
Željko Plesac
Partnership Director at Infinum
