Partner Pulse: Webtown on 16 Years of Building Secure, AI-Ready Banking Portals with Liferay

Sixteen Years Since a Phone Call About Liferay

Webtown's Liferay story starts, fittingly, with a Google search. Peter Kalmar and a group of university friends founded the company in 2005, building smaller PHP projects out of a dormitory in Budapest. By 2009, Peter felt the company needed a more capable platform and started researching the best options for Java development. That search led him to Liferay, and to a former university friend already working in the Liferay community, who talked him through what the platform could do.

What convinced Peter to build a business around it wasn't a feature checklist. It was the experience of using the product itself: the drag-and-drop interface and intuitive way of assembling a portal. Webtown joined the Liferay ecosystem shortly after, almost 16 years ago now, and has grown alongside the platform ever since.

That growth has taken Webtown well beyond Hungary. The company now also operates in the DACH region and has activity in the UK and Ireland market. Five years ago, Webtown expanded into Saudi Arabia, where it continues to deliver projects today, many of them in financial services.

What Banking Users Still Expect, and What They're Starting to Demand

Financial services is a sector where, as Peter puts it, user expectations evolve both very slowly and very quickly at the same time. Some things haven't moved in years: users want to know their money is safe, whether they're using a mobile app or a web portal, and they expect systems that perform reliably under everyday use. In banking, a slow or unresponsive system isn't just an inconvenience, it undermines trust.

What has changed is how much more users now expect beyond the basics. UI, UX, and the overall feel of a platform need to keep improving, which means banking portals have to evolve continuously rather than launch once and stay static. Self-service is a large part of that shift. Younger users in particular have little interest in visiting a branch to manage routine tasks, a trend that plays directly into the strengths of a flexible customer portal.

Compliance: The Hardest Constraint to Design Around

Ask Peter what's hardest to get right in regulated industries, and the answer isn't technical at all. It's compliance.

Webtown once hosted a roundtable in Budapest with leaders from several banks to discuss user experience and digitalization. The pattern that emerged was consistent: whenever a new idea came up, the biggest obstacle was the legal and compliance work behind it, and how slowly a bank can realistically change a process. Users want a simple journey. Banks, meanwhile, have to satisfy a long list of regulatory requirements before any good idea can ship, which is often why loan applications and onboarding flows ask for more information than users expect or understand.

That tension isn't going away. As Peter notes, the push toward digitalization keeps accelerating, but the legal and regulatory requirements underneath it stay largely the same.

Modernizing Without Just Changing the Technology

Looking back at approaches that haven't aged well, Peter points to "shift-only" modernization: replacing the technology underneath a system while leaving everything else, including the user experience, untouched. It's an understandable shortcut, since legacy backend systems are often more complex than users realize. But changing the technology without rethinking the journey on top of it tends to just carry old problems into a new platform.

The more effective approach, in Peter's experience, is to treat modernization as a chance to rethink the full user journey, even when branding and backend constraints stay fixed. That thinking extends to AI as well. Peter sees real value in AI answering general, already-public questions, like what's included in a banking package. But once the conversation shifts to personalized banking data, the questions change: what data is being shared, which models are processing it, where those models run, and what governance sits on top of it all.

Which brings the conversation right back to compliance, the constant thread running through Webtown's 16 years of building AI-ready financial services portals.

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About Webtown

Webtown is a software development company based in Budapest, Hungary, founded in 2005. The company partners with enterprises and government organizations to build custom software, websites, self-service portals, and B2B commerce solutions.

Webtown has worked with Liferay since 2010 and has grown into one of the largest Liferay practices in the ecosystem, with multiple dedicated delivery teams and offices in Budapest, Vienna, London, and Riyadh. Today, as a Platinum Partner, Webtown supports organizations across Europe and the Middle East, with a strong focus on financial services and public sector projects.

Interview Transcript

Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation for readability.

Liferay:

Hello and welcome to Partner Pulse. Today I'm joined by Peter Kalmar, CEO of Webtown. Hi, Peter.

Peter Kalmar:

Hello, hi. Thanks for having me.

Liferay:

Thanks for taking the time. Peter and his team have been part of the Liferay ecosystem for many years, working on portal and platform projects across Europe. Today we'll talk about Webtown's journey with Liferay and how their approach to portal projects has evolved over time.

Peter, you're basically a veteran of the Liferay ecosystem. For those who don't know you, could you introduce us to Webtown? Tell us a bit about your background, and maybe take us back to the moment you first decided that Liferay was the right platform to build a portal.

Peter Kalmar:

We started the company when I was at university. Back then, a few friends and I were living in the dormitory, working on different IT projects. The company started in 2005, and at the beginning we worked mostly on PHP and smaller projects.

Then, in 2009, I felt we needed something more, so we decided to move to Java. I started googling what the best Java CMS was, and I found Liferay as an option. I began downloading and testing the software, and I remembered a friend who had been working with Liferay for a long time. We had been at university together, so I called him and asked him to tell me more about Liferay.

We started talking, and I felt this was something I could sell, because I liked the drag-and-drop, intuitive way of working with the product. So we joined the ecosystem, almost 16 years ago now. It's been a long journey together. We grew alongside Liferay and delivered a lot of different projects in the market.

We started in Budapest, Hungary, and later opened offices in other territories. Now we're also active in the DACH region, and we have some activity in the UK and Ireland. Five years ago, we also expanded into Saudi Arabia, where we're doing a lot of different projects.

Liferay:

A lot of your projects are in financial services, so let's start there. Financial services is probably one of those industries where user expectations evolve both very slowly and very quickly at the same time. Given web experiences in that sector, what are some user expectations in banking that haven't really changed over the years, and that still shape your work today?

Peter Kalmar:

When we talk about banking, security is one of the key elements. Whatever you do with your bank, you want to be sure your money is safe, no matter which touchpoint you use: a mobile app, a portal, or anything else. That hasn't changed, and it's still very important. I think that's one reason why Liferay is such a good fit for financial institutions: security matters a lot to them.

Performance is also very important. Users want to be sure that whatever system they're using performs well. When you want to manage something, it's important not to get a message saying the system isn't working, especially in banking and financial services. So those things haven't changed.

But users now want more. The UI, the UX, the whole feeling of the platform: they want it to keep getting better, and that means it needs to evolve continuously.

Liferay:

Self-service is probably the biggest part of that.

Peter Kalmar:

Absolutely. You don't want to go to a branch and sit there to manage something. I'm curious how much longer physical branches will still be relevant, because the younger generation really doesn't want to go anywhere to manage their finances. They want self-service, and that's a very good fit for a Liferay-based solution.

Liferay:

In regulated industries, when you build portals for organizations operating under strict rules, what's the hardest non-technical constraint to get right? It could be legal, auditability, or data-related. What's the hardest thing to get right that isn't purely technical?

Peter Kalmar:

I think compliance is the big one. I remember we once ran a roundtable event in Budapest and invited people from different banks, including some leaders. We talked about user experience, digitalization, and a lot of related topics.

Whenever we suggested trying something new, the biggest obstacle was always the legal background: compliance, and how complex or slow it is for a bank to change a process. As a user, you want an easy journey. But as a bank, there are a lot of regulations behind every decision, and even a good idea takes time to work through all the required processes. That's often why these workflows end up so complex, and why you don't understand why you have to fill in so much information just to get a loan.

Everything is moving toward digitalization now, but the legal regulations and compliance requirements are still there, and they don't change much.

Liferay:

Thinking about the kinds of portals you've built again and again, ones that offer self-service onboarding or knowledge bases, what's the one design decision that often makes the difference between something users merely tolerate and something they actually enjoy using?

Peter Kalmar:

I think people tolerate things when they understand and feel that it's for their own safety. If I have to fill in a lot of information on a form, and I understand it's because the bank wants to make sure nobody can steal my money or that I'll get the right loan, I can tolerate that as a user.

But what people don't tolerate is when things feel slower than expected. Fintech applications are a good example of the alternative: apps like Revolut offer a very clear and easy journey for whatever you want to do in online banking. Because of that, people increasingly look for that same kind of experience on their bank's website.

Liferay:

In closing, let's look at modernization. Certain modernization trends come and go, and not all of them age well. What's a modernization approach you no longer recommend, whether you've seen it fail outright or simply seen the results fall short?

Peter Kalmar:

We've had projects in the past that were more of a "shift-only" type of migration: keep everything as it is, but just change the technology behind it. Sometimes there's a good reason for that. Users don't always realize how complex the backend really is; transferring money from a mobile app looks simple, but it isn't. The backend systems are often very complex, and usually there are legacy systems involved.

But if you're going to move to a new technology, it also makes sense to rethink what a good user experience looks like today. Changing the technology and rethinking everything else at the same time can feel like it makes a project more complex. But once you decide to modernize, it's worth thinking more deeply about the whole process: the user journeys, the user experience, and how that journey looks and feels, even when the branding itself is fixed.

AI is also an important part of this. Everyone's talking about it now. When you go to a website and just want to understand what's included in a banking package, you can ask an AI and get an answer. That's fine, since that kind of information is already public: it doesn't matter much which AI model answers it, as long as the answer is accurate.

But when we talk about banking data and more personalized experiences, it becomes much more important to think about what data gets shared, with which models, where those models run, how the data is handled, and what governance sits on top of all of it.

Liferay:

So, we're back to compliance.

Peter Kalmar:

There we go.

Liferay:

We always come back to that, because it's a key aspect of all of this. Thanks, Peter, thank you very much for your insights. I really enjoyed our conversation, and here's to many more years of the Webtown-Liferay partnership.

Peter Kalmar:

Thank you, and thank you for having me.

Ready to Modernize Your Banking Portal?

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