Interview with Michel Diab, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, VeriPark

Microsoft PAC (Partner Advisory Council) interview in Redmond, WA, USA | October 09, 2025.

VeriPark’s Michel Diab shares how AI, Microsoft and industry expertise are shaping AI-first financial institutions and transforming digital banking.

M: My name is Michel Diab, and I’m the Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at VeriPark.

VeriPark is a long-standing Microsoft solution partner and ISV. Our headquarters are in London, and we operate out of 15 offices globally. We focus exclusively on the financial services industry and we support more than 150 financial institutions worldwide.

Our work centers around designing and enabling end-to-end customer journeys. We help our clients enhance their customer experience across CRM, digital channels, loan origination, and branch automation. With more than 1,000 employees, our entire organization is built around helping the financial sector deliver better, more connected, more intelligent experiences.

FSI Is Still in Exploration Mode with AI—But Momentum Is Building

M: Financial services is, of course, a highly regulated industry. Because of this, new technologies, especially AI, take time to be fully understood and responsibly adopted.

Right now, I would say most banks are still very much in the exploration stage. They’re trying to understand what AI means for them, how it can be leveraged, what the regulatory and privacy implications are, and how it fits into their overall strategy. VeriPark is deeply involved in helping them define AI use cases that can genuinely drive growth and productivity while staying compliant with the strict requirements of the sector.

A Deep, 25-Year Partnership with Microsoft

M: Our partnership with Microsoft is central to this journey. We’ve been working exclusively with Microsoft for 25 years. Microsoft leads the innovation across Copilot, Azure, and the evolving agentic AI ecosystem and VeriPark translates that innovation into industry language.

We work closely with Microsoft engineering teams as part of early-adopter programs, and we help bring these technologies into a financial-services context. Essentially, Microsoft drives the horizontal innovation, and VeriPark brings it to the right personas, in the right way, for the financial industry.

Building an AI-First Product Suite for Financial Services

M: A major part of our strategy today revolves around becoming AI-first. And that transformation is happening across four motions.

• First, we’re undergoing our own internal AI transformation. Every department including engineering, marketing, sales, HR, and finance is being modernized to use AI more effectively. This has been underway for more than a year.

• Second, we’re building an AI-first product suite. We are embedding agentic AI deeply into our CRM, customer-experience suite, digital channels, and lending solutions to make them more intuitive, more proactive, and more relevant to the industry.

• Third, we’re defining AI-first processes. Over the past two years, we hired a group of experienced bankers with a single mission: identify and design AI scenarios that genuinely matter to financial institutions. Today, we have around 40 fully defined use cases—scenarios we are transforming into ready-to-use AI agents.

• And finally, we’re creating AI-first digital channels. Digital is now the primary focus for growth in banking. We see two major priorities: digital selling with AI, and digital servicing with AI. Both are top of mind for financial institutions today.

Massive Growth Opportunities in AI and North America

M: There are two major growth opportunities ahead of us.

• The first is linked to Microsoft. AI, and the journey toward becoming an AI-first financial institution, is the biggest opportunity we see. It spans our product suite, our defined use cases, and the evolution of digital banking.

• The second opportunity is the geographic expansion of VeriPark, especially in North America. Two years ago, we invested in building a dedicated development center in Calgary, Canada. Today we have more than 100 people across the U.S. and Canada, and we have already onboarded eight credit unions onto our end-to-end SaaS platform. The potential in North America is enormous.

Working Hand-in-Hand with Microsoft: Engineering, Go-To-Market and Industry Teams

M: As for how we work with Microsoft: there are a few areas where alignment is especially important.

• One is the close relationship with Microsoft’s engineering teams. Technology is evolving extremely fast, and staying part of early-adopter programs helps us incorporate innovation into our product road map early.

• The second is the go-to-market motion. Being part of Microsoft’s campaigns, events, and thought-leadership initiatives is invaluable for us as an ISV.

• And finally, as Microsoft builds its agentic AI library, we want to ensure that the agents we develop for the financial sector become part of that ecosystem. This is an area where we’re working even more closely with Microsoft.

Marketplace Momentum

M: All our products are already on Microsoft’s Marketplace, and that’s how we transact for most digital channel and CRM deals. As Microsoft evolves the Marketplace, we will be exploring those new capabilities as well.

We also work very closely with Microsoft’s industry teams. VeriPark has long been part of the financial-services partner ecosystem and the Inner Circle, and these relationships keep us aligned with Microsoft’s priorities in FSI from strategy to go-to-market.

A Proven Model: Canada as a Success Story

M: I’ll end with an example from Canada. When we expanded into North America, we started with the credit union segment. Together with Microsoft, we began by creating awareness around digital banking transformation. Then we developed partnerships with credit-union service organizations, such as Central 1.

Eventually, we built a complete 360° SaaS offering for credit unions based on our IP and the market responded very strongly. Today, eight credit unions are live on our platform, including some of the largest institutions in the country.

It’s a great example of how the right technology, the right partnership, and the right industry focus can create real momentum.