The Resonance Test 99: Balazs Fejes and Boris Chave on Syz Bank's Digital Transformation

“In French, we say when it’s raining at a wedding, it will be a beautiful marriage leading to a happy life,” says Syz Bank COO, Boris Chave. Reflecting on an announcement made on stage in 2023 alongside EPAM’s now-CEO Balazs Fejes during an afternoon storm in Geneva, Chave adds: “I think this rainy event was the beginning of a successful project and a happy partnership between Syz and EPAM.” Swiss banks have a well-known reputation for being protective of customer data, and Syz Bank is no exception. For years, the bank relied on on-prem servers and top-shelf security solutions to protect its customer data. However, the cost of those solutions was rising sharply, which led Chave to wonder if there existed a better solution. “The challenge with our setup was that even though we had these best-in-breed technology solutions, the ongoing investments we needed to make to protect our data just weren’t sustainable. I had to ask myself, should we continue down this path with its huge impact on P&L? Not to mention I wasn’t comfortable with the complexity of our systems.” Fast forward to June of 2025, and EPAM has just finished helping Syz Bank migrate all its IT infrastructure to cloud-based systems, no small feat. As Fejes points out, “You got new notebooks, new applications, you migrated everything to the cloud. You basically built, de facto, a brand-new bank.” As Chave notes, not only did EPAM help Syz Bank navigate the cloud migration, but we did so with minimal impact on operations. “So many aspects of this project have been a huge success. We delivered on time and on budget without any outages for customers or employees.” The move to the cloud came at a rather fortuitous time. Fejes says: “When you and I met on that stage in 2023, nobody was really talking about AI yet. But now you’re probably finding yourself in a very privileged situation because some of your competitors might still need to work on what I would call the foundational elements of their infrastructure, whereas you’re in a situation where you can take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud.” Says Chave: “The foundation we have now will give us access to some of the best AI technology without having to make huge investments in infrastructure just to deliver something. We can try out new tools and pivot quickly.” Beyond enabling new and surprising technologies, the move to the cloud also had another major impact on Syz Bank: a reduction in complexity. What was previously 140 applications working together to protect the bank’s data has been reduced to seven on the cloud system. “So many people are underestimating the impact of complexity in terms of environment stability and cost. Program simplification is probably one of the best ways to achieve cost-efficient operations,” says Fejes. It might seem counterintuitive that such a complex transformation could result in such simplicity, but that’s exactly how this project played out. Now, with the stage set, let’s raise the curtain on this episode. Host: Michael Nicholls Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon