“I wasn’t just building another IT technology or development company,” quips Karoly Krokovay, CEO at Informula Kft, as he opens up while sharing about how his professional life shaped. He adds, “I was solving a personal dilemma that had long accompanied my career.” That’s how he frames the genesis of Informula, not as a business move but as a response to a deeper, career-long tension: how to bring ambitious ideas to life without having to scale that mountain alone.
Informula wasn’t built to offer piecemeal fixes. It was designed to rewire how banks think about transformation from the inside out. Karoly envisioned a high-caliber collective engineered to solve the kinds of problems most firms sidestep. What was the goal? Build scalable solutions that sync with long-range vision, not just short-term wins.
As the industry redirects toward real-time, event-driven ecosystems, Informula stays ahead of the curve by helping banks transition to streaming-first architectures that are agile, secure, and relentlessly customer-focused.
A Real-Time Banking Breakthrough
When a major bank’s mobile app rollout hit a wall, marred by a sluggish performance from a REST API–based architecture, Karoly saw more than a technical hiccup. He saw an opportunity to redefine the bank’s digital DNA. Customers were frustrated by the lag, expecting instant, personalized insights that the system couldn’t deliver.
Informula stepped in with a bold pilot of real-time data aggregation powered by Kafka-based streaming. The result was remarkable. The app loading time has been drastically shortened. With such a real-time aggregation, users of a banking mobile app can view categorised monthly expenses at the moment of login through a simple, radically rethought interaction.
The pilot didn’t just succeed; it sparked a platform-wide shift. The bank embraced the streaming-first approach across CRM, liquidity management, and merchant payments. For Karoly, it wasn’t about fixing broken pipes. Instead, it redefined how the bank interacted with data and served its customers.
The Pulse of Innovation at Informula
Recognized as one of “The Most Influential CEOs Driving Innovation and Impact, 2025,” Karoly considers innovation to be shaped by three diligent forces: real-time business-ready data, event-driven business, and AI agent architecture, and domain-specific intelligence. But tools alone don’t drive transformation, mindset does. At Informula, innovation thrives in a culture where curiosity sparks like wildfire. From junior coders to senior architects, everyone has a voice. Teams are encouraged to experiment, challenge conventions, and treat failure as a stepping stone, not a setback. Monthly knowledge-sharing sessions combine client challenges with emerging technology, turning insights into action and keeping Informula sharp.
Engineering Trust: How Informula Guarantees Real-Time Reliability
For Karoly, reliability isn’t a feature, it’s a foundational promise. At Informula, it rests on two core principles: engineering discipline and trust. Every component, from Kafka streams to security protocols, is rigorously tested through layered rounds of automation and hands-on scrutiny before it ever touches production.
Their partnership with Confluent reinforces this commitment, providing a streaming backbone that aligns with the strictest global banking security standards. Yet, as Karoly explains, “The biggest challenge isn’t technical—it’s operational maturity.”
Many clients start without the internal muscle to manage streaming ecosystems. That’s where Informula steps in, with round-the-clock operational support that keeps mission-critical systems humming, protecting both uptime and user experience.
Where Data Thinks for Itself: Informula’s AI-Driven Vision
This industry veteran sees the future of IT unfolding in real time, where data doesn’t just inform decisions. It makes them. As AI agents gain autonomy, event-driven microservices become essential for isolating failures, responding instantly, and securing distributed systems.
Informula is already deploying anomaly detection that flags outliers before they escalate and is experimenting with generative AI agents subscribing to Kafka topics to interpret document images and drive contextual automation. Karoly believes the true potential lies in fusing live data with intelligent systems, a convergence Informula is actively building toward to lead the next wave of disruption.
Measuring Impact Through Lasting Transformation
Karoly explains that at Informula, “Impact isn’t measured in deployment milestones—it’s visible when clients change how they operate.” To him, real success is reflected in a client’s ability to rethink their operations, build new capabilities, and strengthen their market position.
He points to a landmark proof-of-concept during a major banking merger, where Informula’s streaming platform synchronized fractured legacy systems in real time. The outcome wasn’t just smoother, it was seamless, preserving customer trust during institutional upheaval.
Yet the real breakthrough came later. With a decoupled, flexible architecture in place, the bank accelerated future digital initiatives, even when collaborating with external vendors. Informula’s solution became a strategic springboard, enabling faster rollouts that set the client apart in a crowded market. Karoly stresses that their mission is systemic readiness, building capabilities that enable clients to innovate long after the engagement ends.
Proactive Innovation: The Strategic Imperative for Market Leadership
The mark of an exceptional CEO is the ability to anticipate shifts before they become urgent demands. Karoly exemplifies this by integrating Kafka into Informula’s architecture well ahead of client requests. This strategic bet stemmed from his deep industry insight, spotting the limitations of REST-based microservices early and recognizing event-driven architecture as the backbone of scalable, resilient banking ecosystems.
The risk was significant. Informula invested time, talent, and resources without guaranteed returns. The foresight yielded high-value use cases, earning Informula its seat at the table, early, prepared, and proven.
Karoly emphasizes that this change went beyond technology. It reshaped company culture. “To anticipate-not react” became the foundational drumbeat of their progress. He notes that they learned “To invest early in ideas that have the potential to become game-changers, even if they’re not ‘billable’ yet.” Innovation sprints and a platform mindset encourage multidisciplinary teams to experiment, co-creating solutions beyond active projects. Promising ideas are refined, productized, and sometimes integrated into clients’ strategic toolkits.
In a heavily regulated, risk-averse industry, this upbeat culture is essential. It helps clients to future-proof their digital strategies and positions Informula as a trusted, long-term partner in capability building rather than just a short-term vendor for delivery.
Where Bold Ideas Take Root
For Karoly, leadership is less about directing traffic and more about clearing the path. He’s built Informula around the idea that people do their boldest, most creative work when they feel safe enough to ask tough questions, test bold solutions, and fail forward.
That trust is evident in everyday interactions. At Informula, “Mistakes are not hidden—they’re surfaced and shared so we can all learn from them.” The goal isn’t to assign blame but to understand what broke and why so the system can improve. This, Karoly says, cultivates a culture of both accountability and innovation.
He sees the team not as a hierarchy but as a dynamic nexus of shared brilliance. “We’re not a group of experts competing for attention,” he remarks, “we’re a tribe of builders aligned around a common mission.” Everyone from senior architects to junior engineers is invited to shape the outcome. What matters is the clarity of thought, not the title. That flatness helps keep the work nimble, collaborative, and deeply intentional.
Karoly is one of those leaders who measure success by how far others rise. He doesn’t lead from the front for visibility. Instead, he leads from behind to clear the path, removing friction and resolving roadblocks. Karoly sees his role as CEO not as the final decision-maker or code reviewer but as the one who shields his team from noise, unblocks dependencies, and keeps the “why” of their work burning bright. When people are anchored in purpose and supported with clarity, he believes, they don’t just deliver, they grow, stretch, and thrive. Leadership, to him, means holding space for curiosity, encouraging dissent, and providing the best ideas, not the loudest, to rise to the top.
That same internal trust spills over to clients, who see Informula not as a vendor but as a long-view partner. “When trust and inspiration lead the way,” Karoly asserts, “real innovation follows.”
Future-Forward, Together
This C-suite executive doesn’t just anticipate trends. He builds for them before they crest. Karoly is especially energized by three emerging forces poised to shape the next three to five years: Generative AI embedded into an event-driven environment, event-driven governance models enabling agile collaboration, and corporate cultural transformation to embrace modern technologies.
At Informula, the team is already piloting AI agents that plug into Kafka streams to automate operational intelligence in real-time. But Karoly is just as focused on the human side. The company partners closely with future-focused clients to rethink transaction models for the younger generation of digital-first customers. He believes that real transformation occurs in these co-creative spaces. A setting where ideas are stress-tested, feedback is rapid, and mutual wins are celebrated while collaboratively rectifying each other’s mistakes.
Scaling Soul, Not Just Systems
“Scaling culture is far more complex than scaling technology.” Karoly knows this truth intimately.
As Informula expanded from a tight-knit crew of specialists into a fast-moving, multilayered organization, he faced a defining challenge: how to retain the company’s essence without freezing it in place.
Software can be cloned. Systems can be upgraded. But shaping a culture that remains authentic as the company grows requires far more intention and finesse. That realization prompted Informula to reassess its hiring approach, started building up a mid-level leadership, and integrate its core ethos into the daily work routine, not just the mission statement. Karoly recognized this early and led the charge.
He also realizes modern leadership is a multidimensional craft, one that calls for more than top-tier technical chops. It takes a growth-oriented mindset, emotional intelligence, and the willingness to learn and lead with humility. In his words: “In a world of accelerating change, adaptability is the ultimate competence—not just in how we apply technology, but in how we relate, communicate, and co-create.”
Scaling culture, for him is about protecting a shared essence while allowing new expressions of it to emerge organically. It doesn’t take the route of enforcing uniformity. That’s how Informula stays cohesive yet flexible, innovative yet grounded. It’s also how the company expands its reach, tackling more complex challenges and creating larger impacts without losing sight of why it started in the first place.
Beyond Delivery: Building the Future from Within
Informula was never meant to be “just another vendor.” Even “strategic partner” feels too narrow for what Karoly Krokovay envisioned. He describes the company’s mission as a force multiplier for innovation, a catalyst for transformation that goes far beyond deadlines or deliverables. That ambition is clear in how Informula embeds itself in clients’ journeys.
“Our mission is to mentor organizations through paradigm shifts—from batch-based operations to event-driven architectures, from legacy silos to streaming ecosystems,” Karoly shares. These transitions, he insists, aren’t just technical; they require new ways of thinking about data, how it’s interpreted, governed, and trusted.
Every architectural decision, Karoly believes, carries weight. Especially in banking, where even small backend changes can ripple through public trust, Informula’s focus isn’t speed, it is resilience, integrity, and stewardship. When clients build real-time foundations with Informula, they’re not just boosting performance, they’re reimagining customer experience and institutional trust.
That same mission shapes Informula’s internal culture. Karoly urges his team to build like they’re shaping systems that will outlast them. Every component is part of a longer arc—future-ready, even if the payoff is years away. In that way, ingenuity becomes the foundation for what’s next.
“Legacy is about creating the conditions—inside and outside the company—where people are empowered to build boldly and act responsibly,” Karoly reflects. For him, that’s when technology shifts from a tool for efficiency to a platform for lasting, systemic progress—and where innovation becomes a responsibility, not a race.
Words of Wisdom for Aspirants
“Start with why—but don’t stop there,” he advises aspiring tech CEOs. A bold vision gives a company its soul and direction, but without disciplined execution, it’s just an aspiration. Building something lasting demands structure, patience, and rigor—the unglamorous but utterly necessary ingredients of sustainable innovation.
Karoly, an astute businessman, surrounds himself deliberately with challengers, not yes-men. Those who question his convictions, call out misalignments, or speak uncomfortable truths aren’t roadblocks—they’re lifelines. He remarks, “People who are not afraid to ask difficult questions, offer alternate solutions, or push back when something doesn’t align with our values.”
This kind of constructive tension, he believes, doesn’t derail progress. It fuels it. It is how companies stay honest, stay human, and stay ahead.
Innovation Thrives Where Trust Meets Courage
According to Karoly, “Innovation begins with courage—but thrives in trust.” Over the years, he’s learned that the most game-changing ideas rarely come from the CEO’s desk. They emerge from the edges—unexpected voices and a culture where people feel safe to challenge norms and explore beyond the obvious. So what’s Karoly’s axiom? He stresses, “The secret (in:)formula is: Build that space. Protect it. Celebrate it.” It’s in that space where individuals grow, teams strengthen, and companies reinvent themselves. For Karoly, mastering this balance doesn’t just deliver better technology; it shapes better leaders, builds stronger teams, and lights the path to a brighter future.
