Tighter AI regulation is raising the bar for engineering talent. Some fintechs are finding what they need in Croatia.
When Stephen Walsh — founder and CEO — set up an office in Varaždin, a baroque town in northern Croatia, his Irish software firm was not chasing cheap labor. It was chasing talent—and a time zone that let its engineers talk to London before lunch and New York after. Walsh founded Keeper Solutions in Ireland in 2011 and turned to Croatia early, drawn by the caliber of the country’s computer-science graduates. Universities such as the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) in Zagreb and the Faculty of Organisation and Informatics (FOI) in Varaždin produce developers who are not only technically strong but notably fluent in English—more so, Walsh argues, than their counterparts in much of central Europe.
The appeal goes beyond the lecture theatre. Croatia is a warm, politically stable EU and eurozone member, comfortably removed from the security anxieties that shadow parts of eastern Europe closer to the conflict in Ukraine. Its business environment, though not as frictionless as Ireland’s, is manageable: Walsh credits his tax and compliance partner, Mazars, with helping the firm navigate local regulations and build a clean reputation with the authorities—important when recruiting from a national talent pool of roughly 50,000 developers and the hundreds of thousands more across neighboring countries.
That long presence has compounded. Over the past 14 years, the firm has served as the core engineering team behind client businesses whose transactions and valuations exceed $1.6 billion—including Taxamo’s acquisition by Vertex for more than a quarter of a billion dollars and Britebill’s exit for more than $70 million. Its longest engagement, with Fexco—a global leader in dynamic currency conversion and cruise-industry payments spanning 125,000 merchants across 29 countries—has run continuously with a Zagreb-based team of nearly 20 developers.
The model translates across the Atlantic. In Atlanta, Good Agriculture—winner of the 2024 FinTech South Innovation Challenge—engaged Keeper for a design sprint before moving into full development. “The knowledge of the customer is always the part you’re most nervous about when outsourcing,” says Good Agriculture founder Alex Locklear. “They did a great job of asking the right questions and translating that into production.”
Where Keeper is now pushing ahead is AI governance. Its proprietary AI Gateway routes queries across multiple large language models while scanning for sensitive data, diverting flagged prompts to secure internal models rather than public interfaces. With the EU AI Act now in force alongside existing payment security and data protection rules, the compliance burden is architectural, not theoretical. Deployed first inside Keeper itself, the gateway cut the firm’s own AI-related costs by 60% and doubled developer productivity, according to Walsh.
“If your AI architecture cannot prove where the data went,” he says, “you have a regulatory problem—not a technology one.”
Whether Croatia can sustain its advantage is an open question: salaries are rising, and big American technology firms are recruiting there as well. For now, though, Walsh’s firm offers something the conventional offshoring debate tends to miss: not cheaper engineers, but better-embedded ones.
Learn more about Keeper Solutions at keepersolutions.com.
Government