As multi-jurisdictional banks modernise legacy platforms to meet new regulatory, operational and customer-experience demands, the role of quality assurance in managing complex, multi-region transformations has become pivotal.
Few examples capture this shift better than Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), the Vienna-based group serving around 18 million customers across 11 markets in Central and Eastern Europe.
For RBI, ensuring consistency, digital resilience and compliance across a diverse landscape of systems and regulations required more than just technology upgrades, it demanded a new approach to testing and delivery governance.
The bank has been intensively investing in modernisation to improve speed, cost efficiency and customer experience. At the heart of this transformation lies its core banking system, and in pursuit of streamlined operations and cross-border compliance, RBI has deployed the popular banking solution Temenos Core Banking in Kosovo, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in branches in Poland and China.
The challenge for any QA organisation in a bank operating at this scale is how to deliver consistent, seamless digital services across countries while maintaining control of quality and compliance.
RBI acknowledged that this required “a modern IT landscape that supports agility, shorter time-to-market, scale, and cost efficiency.”
With different entities across the group running various versions of Temenos Core Banking, testing and integration had become increasingly complex.
For QA teams, the key was to design frameworks capable of managing multi-country data sets, functional and regression testing, and integration points across payments, channels and core systems.
To tackle these challenges, RBI decided to consolidate its expertise. “The core banking system is the heart of our IT landscape,” explained Dr Chadi Suleiman, RBI’s lead for international core banking systems.
“We wanted to centralise expertise to ensure quality and speed across the group.”
– Dr Chadi Suleiman
The solution was to create a dedicated Competence Centre, internally branded as the ‘T24 Hub’, within Raiffeisen Tech in Poland. This hub brings together specialists from across the organisation to standardise test methodology, tools and governance while reducing reliance on external contractors.
Piotr Kiryluk, Head of the T24 Hub, said the first challenge was defining priorities: “The main challenges were to identify what skills we wanted to develop, and at what scale of investment. Operating in multiple regions, each with distinct needs, it was important to take a considered approach, so we could ensure the Centre has relevance.”
By embedding this central team into local project environments, he added, RBI has achieved a more unified approach to QA and delivery.
“We’ve been able to embed expertise in local project teams, so there is consistency in how we evaluate, select and implement technologies across the group,” Kiryluk explained.
A major factor in the success of this centralised QA model has been RBI’s long-standing partnership with Temenos, which dates back to 1999. The Temenos Customer Success team played a crucial role in training, governance and stakeholder engagement.
Suleiman emphasised the impact of this collaboration: “Having a dedicated Customer Success Manager was critical. They helped us connect with the right people across Temenos and kept the momentum going. The certification wouldn’t have happened without that level of partnership.”
He described the collaboration as “a true extension” of its own QA organisation, ensuring alignment, support and quality oversight during complex rollouts and upgrades.
Now, with its multi-country core banking deployments stabilising, RBI is preparing for the next stage: cloud migration. The T24 Hub will define and execute this group-wide transition, moving from fragmented deployments to a harmonised, cloud-native core banking environment that demands new forms of QA.
For QA and testing teams in financial services, RBI’s experience highlights how success in digital transformation depends not only on advanced technologies but also on institutionalising testing excellence.
As banks shift to cloud-native platforms and adopt AI-driven automation, the quality agenda expands to include resilience testing, cross-region compliance, data sovereignty and continuous delivery pipelines.
RBI’s centralised QA model shows how quality assurance, when embedded strategically, can become a driver of innovation and scale, not just a checkpoint in the software delivery process.
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Looking for more news on regulations and compliance requirements driving developments in software quality engineering at financial firms? Visit our dedicated Regulation & Compliance page here.
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