Viktoriia Yefimenko, Comms Hub: “The companies that scale successfully understand that communications are a critical infrastructure”

Focus Gaming News spoke with Communications Hub CEO Viktoriia Yefimenko to discuss why centralised communication infrastructure is essential for scaling businesses to maintain integrity and long-term delivery trust.

Exclusive interview.- As digital-first businesses grow faster and operate across more markets, communication has quietly become one of their most fragile dependencies. Focus Gaming News sat down with Communications Hub CEO Viktoriia Yefimenko to talk about why centralised communication is no longer optional, where fast-scaling companies go wrong and what “integrity” really means when millions of messages are on the line.

Many companies still treat communications as a collection of tools. Why do you believe a centralised communications hub has become a business-critical layer rather than a technical convenience?

For a long time, communications were treated as something tactical: a way to send notifications, confirmations or marketing messages. But once a business reaches a certain scale, communication stops being a function and starts becoming a system that directly affects revenue, compliance, customer trust and operational speed.

A centralised communications hub enables a very important shift in mindset – from simply sending messages to designing communication outcomes. When you can control routing, reliability, analytics and fallback logic from one place, communication becomes predictable and measurable. At that point, it’s no longer a technical convenience. It’s business-critical infrastructure that leadership needs to understand and trust.

ICE brings together fast-moving industries like igaming, fintech and e-commerce. From your perspective, what’s the biggest communication mistake these sectors keep repeating as they scale?

The most common mistake is fragmentation. As companies expand into new geos or experiment with new channels, they tend to add point solutions one by one – one provider for a specific country, another for a new channel, a third for backup. On paper, it looks flexible, but in reality, it creates lock-in, operational drag, inconsistent data and a lot of hidden complexity.

Over time, scaling actually becomes harder, not easier. Teams spend more time maintaining the stack than improving the experience. What often gets overlooked is that sustainable growth requires a unified communication layer – one system that can flex across channels and regions without rebuilding everything each time. Without that foundation, speed slows down, and trust, both internal and external, starts to erode.

Communications Hub talks a lot about integrity and reliability. In practical terms, what does “communication integrity” actually mean for a business sending millions of messages a day?

When you’re sending millions of messages daily, integrity is about control and transparency. It means every message is delivered exactly as intended – to the right recipient, at the right time, through the right route and that the business can prove it.

Practically, this comes down to a few core things: no silent loss or manipulation of traffic, deterministic routing and failover that are explainable and auditable, and end-to-end traceability so every message can be tracked, reconciled, and reported on. Just as importantly, reliability has to remain consistent as volume grows. Integrity is what allows a company to treat its communication layer as core infrastructure, not as a black box it hopes will work.

If a growing business came to you focused only on reducing message costs, what would you tell them they’re overlooking about long-term communication performance and trust?

I would tell them that optimising purely for unit cost means optimising for the shortest possible horizon. Communication quality compounds over time – both positively and negatively.

Poor routing, unstable suppliers and opaque delivery don’t just cause occasional failures. They can damage sender reputation, reduce deliverability, trigger filtering and quietly increase total cost through retries, manual intervention, higher support load and lost conversions. None of that shows up on a price list, but all of it shows up in business results.

In the long run, trust is built on predictability and control, not cheap traffic. The companies that scale successfully understand that communications are a critical infrastructure. When reliability, transparency and compliance are built in from the start, they protect revenue and brand and often end up costing less over time. 

“In the long run, trust is built on predictability and control, not cheap traffic.”

Viktoriia Yefimenko, CEO of Communications Hub.

As messaging volumes rise and customer expectations tighten, the difference between “sending messages” and managing communications as infrastructure becomes impossible to ignore. For Viktoriia Yefimenko and the team at Communications Hub, the goal is clear: move communications out of the shadows of tech stacks and into the centre of business strategy – where trust, visibility and scale are designed, not improvised.