Budapest, New Markets, and a Very Good Spring
This May, we expanded our partnership with Wonderful in two directions at once - Hungary and the Baltics. Both markets are new territory for the client, and both are exactly the kind of mandate we find most interesting: a strong product entering complex markets where language, regulation, and legacy infrastructure make the story genuinely hard to tell and worth telling well.
Vedran Bajer leads Wonderful's operations across Hungary, the Adriatic, and the Baltics. He officially entered the Hungarian market this month, and our job was to make sure the right people heard about it before, during, and after the launch.
The plan for Hungary
The goal was simple - get Vedran in front of senior decision-makers at the first real opportunity, with media coverage that would give Wonderful a footprint in this market from day one. We identified Portfolio.hu's Financial IT 2026 as the right room: 300+ banking, fintech, and technology leaders, one of the strongest annual gatherings in the Hungarian financial sector - secured a speaking slot, coordinated a pre-event interview, and made sure the story landed.
A week before the conference, Portfolio published a full interview with Vedran covering Wonderful's rise to unicorn status, the Hungarian market entry, and why complexity is a competitive advantage for a platform built specifically for hard markets.
Then came the keynote.
What Vedran said
His own words say it better than ours:
"11pm tonight, somewhere in Budapest, a customer opens their banking app with a real problem. A transaction they don't recognize. A card they need blocked. There is no one there. There is a chatbot: 'I'm sorry, our agents are available Monday to Friday, 8am to 4pm.' That customer closes the app, and quietly starts thinking about your competitor.
That was how I opened the keynote at Portfolio Financial IT 2026 this morning, in a Marriott ballroom full of the people who run AI strategy at every major bank in Hungary.
The argument: three walls keep banking AI stuck in pilots. Core banking systems 15, 20, sometimes 30 years old that were never built for APIs. Regulators who turn a wrong AI decision into a compliance event rather than a product failure. And the language - customers speak Hungarian, not a Central European approximation of it, and the moment your agent sounds wrong, you lose trust you do not get back.
The number I genuinely think will be the headline of the next 24 months: industry average for end-to-end AI resolution in banking is around 3%. We run 60%+ in production. Not 2x. 20x.
We do not have a Budapest office. Yet."
The write-up ran on Portfolio the same day.
What's next
We also got to meet the Forbes Hungary team, which opens up some interesting conversations for the months ahead. And it was great to see Ágnes Veronika Kovács, whose knowledge of this market has been invaluable from the start.
Two new markets, one strong week. More to come from both.