13.11.2023 | Featured News

Evitec announces cloud strategy: “Inspiring innovations in finance.”

Evitec has today announced its refreshed strategy focusing on working alongside customers as a trusted partner to enable their digital transformation journey and transition to the cloud.

– The Evitec group has always been at the forefront of technological innovation. It’s essential in this kind of business where customers expect us to deliver seamless, user-friendly and accessible digital solutions. We need to meet these expectations by combining our business and technological expertise with the latest cloud-based technologies and SaaS business model, states Evitec’s CEO Mikko Pilkama.

– Our customers are moving their solutions to the cloud while having to maintain their focus on regulatory and ESG changes in the coming years. We are moving into an era where a SaaS business model option is a must for even the biggest financial institutions while they are planning to optimate the number of vendors due to these regulatory changes. Evitec aims to build on this by investing more resources into productizing our offering as well as attracting and developing the best talent in the fintech industry, Pilkama continues.

Finland, Nordics and Europe

Evitec’s customers are the largest financial sector institutions in Finland and Sweden. Evitec’s aim is to serve them through the technical solution modernisation for optimal efficiency and ability to bring out new services to the market.

– Some of our offerings, like the covered bonds solution, have great potential also outside the Nordics, states Pilkama.

Evitec’s mission and vision

The company’s mission is to modernise its customers’ businesses by combining technology with human insight, with the vision “Inspiring innovations in finance”.

Evitec’s unique strengths describe how we create value for our current and future customers. By having deep understanding of our customers’ business as well as the local regulatory environment, our offerings combine both products and services to provide a unique value proposition to customers as their long-term trusted partner.

Evitec’s values underline our status as a trusted partner in the financial sector: from person to person, passion and curiosity to learn, joy and desire to help.

– We’re at the start of our next chapter of the Evitec journey. We have a great potential to combine the technical and business acumen with our productized solutions to provide unique business value to our customers, both for existing and new ones. I am excited about the future and look forward to continue to work closely with our customers as they modernise their digital solutions, ends Pilkama.

For further information, please contact:
Evitec, CEO Mikko Pilkama, Tel. +358 9 681 731

Evitec is a Nordic expert in software solutions and consultation services for the finance sector. Analytics and data management services are available across multiple sectors. We are a bold innovator and a challenger. Our expertise stems from the deep and long-standing cooperation with our customers for over 30 years. We have offices in Espoo, Tampere, Pori, Lahti, Lappeenranta, Tallinn and Stockholm. The number of employees is over 300.

20.10.2023 | Blog Featured Insights

Our core values will remain untouched – while the journey continues

We might wonder sometime what life is all about – or at least I do every now and then. Some say its meaningless, while some are seizing the moment and maximize it in best possible way.

My name is Fadi Hannah, and I am 41 years old and work as a product marketer at Evitec. I am a father of 2 younger boys, who keeps me busy. Most parents with younger children will recognise themselves without me needing to explain anything further, but just nodding with a smile – that is what I do at least.

Let us re-tape 50 years back to give a better context. My parents were born in Syria and moved to Lebanon when they were teenagers to work in my grandfather’s small meat shop. The Lebanese civil war started, and my parents escaped it to protect us children to give us a second chance.
During my lifetime I have developed through my environment – but some things have not changed within myself – which are my core values which I was raised up with and taught by my parents. One of those is to always be real and truthful – both to myself as well as towards others – since that will make me stand firm, independent on how strong the wind is.

I started at Evitec in August 2023, and this is my 4th company I work at during my 15 years of professional life. I have been at a very large company that is much older than my grandparents – who managed to become 104 years before passing away – but also a company which is in the same age as my boy – who is 4 years old – as well as in between (not as old as I am – but close enough).

What is it with Evitec as a company that keeps me smiling?

We work 8 hours per day, we sleep in average 8 hours per day, we commute in average 1 hour per day, and it remains less hours for our spare time compared to our working day. Of course it is important to have a passion for your work, to enjoy the accompany of your colleagues and have fruitful discussions or whatever you feel is important to you.

I feel incredibly lucky, I have a great coaching manager, great colleagues (both physically and virtually), as well as interesting and challenging work tasks – my three magic wishes are fulfilled!

Evitec is a Nordic expert in software solutions and consultation services for the finance sector with over 30 years of history. I am grateful to be part of a company that creates social change while it is transforming the financial sector by offering a wide range of customized services and software solutions, partnering with professionals in banking, life and pensions insurance and asset management.

The importance to be innovative

The core values of Evitec since day of birth is always to be customer-centric, innovative, and building long-lasting partnerships. This was also declared and highlighted in the outcome from our customer experience survey that was carried out earlier this year – ranked as one of the top 3 advantages, where some of our customers have been part of our journey since day 1. This shows the solid partnership with a strong unity growing together.

We create customer value by solving their pain points which is then delivered through our products and services. In addition, this is an ongoing process, since today’s problem will look different from tomorrow, as well for different customers. The business landscape is evolving, and technology is moving at breakneck pace. But some things will not change and instead remain – the backbone and values of the company. It is like the DNA (the nature) within each species. It is impossible – at least as of today – to manipulate or re-program it in an already existing creature. But there are ways to adjust to the environment (the nurture) – while keeping the nature intact – and instead, adapting the nurture which will foster the individuals’ attributes. The importance of adoption to our environment for our survival, was also highlighted by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory with “survival of the fittest.”

Sweden was ranked as top 3 innovative countries in the world this year, for the 16th consecutive year, according to the WIPO global innovation index. But what does it mean to be innovative?

I discussed this topic with a few colleagues as well as consulting with ChatGPT to get as many angles as possible and ended up that it is to actively seek and implement new ideas, processes, products, or services that create value, solve problems, and differentiate it from competitors – which ties back to Evitec’s core values.

Innovation is the lifeblood, the DNA, of a thriving company, regardless of its age. Innovation is not a destination – it is a journey that requires commitment, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace change. But some things never change – where our core values will remain untouched – while we continue our journey.

15.09.2023 | Blog Featured Insights Technology

Microsoft Fabric: Insights and Considerations from Our Customers

It has been almost four months since Microsoft Fabric entered preview at the end of May. Conversations with our customers have shown a significant level of interest and raised expectations surrounding this offering. Let us explore the reasons behind this interest based on our discussions with customers and address essential considerations for those thinking about adopting it.

Solving Traditional Problems

Interest in Microsoft Fabric primarily arises from its ability to tackle familiar challenges in cloud infrastructure management. Fabric simplifies complex cloud data infrastructures, previously composed of multiple services and platforms, into a unified SaaS service. This consolidation also extends to pricing, offering a more straightforward and clear cost structure. We will go into the pricing model in more detail shortly.

Data Science and Machine Learning Capabilities

Many of our customers are intrigued by Fabric’s built-in data science capabilities. Some have already advanced analytics solutions in their current environment and are eager to explore what Fabric could add to their toolkit. Others have focused on traditional business intelligence but are now considering taking their data-driven business further. Microsoft Fabric’s Synapse Data Science integration brings these capabilities to the forefront, and customers recognize the value of having these tools as part of the Fabric package.

Navigating Concerns

While the interest in Microsoft Fabric is apparent, it is not without its share of questions and concerns. One of the foremost considerations is the maturity level of the product. Given its brief time in the preview phase and the absence of an official release date, customers understandably question its readiness for production use. Moreover, there are still some rough edges in the product that need to be addressed before the official release. Fortunately, familiar tools like Data Factory, Power BI, and Synapse Tools retain their user experience within Fabric, eliminating the need to learn their usage from scratch.

Pricing and Capacity Management

There are few licensing options in the Fabric Preview, affecting Power BI and sharing capabilities, but in the base is a time-based billing (per second with a minimum of one minute) for provisioned compute – Fabric capacity. Pricing varies by region and capacity size.

Currently, only a pay-as-you-go model is available, but a reserved capacity pricing model is in the works. Additionally, OneLake storage is billed at a pay-as-you-go rate. As the costs are generated per used time when the capacity is on, for efficient cost management it is important to close the capacity when it is not needed either manually, or through automation. If Fabric eventually offers internal auto-pause functionality for capacity, this concern will be alleviated. In the meantime, at Evitec, we have developed an automated solution to pause capacity when not in use.

Let us get back to the question of having enough capacity – computing power – for your organization. In the simplest scenario, the entire organization can use a single capacity for all their needs in Fabric. When you start using Fabric, it is a good idea to begin with the smallest capacity and increase it as necessary. As your use of Fabric grows and your organization’s needs become more diverse, you might need to scale up the capacity.

Now, it is important to understand another fundamental term in Microsoft Fabric: workspaces. Workspaces function as containers for Fabric items and can be created for example based on different business domains – this decision is up to your organization. Each workspace is associated with a capacity, and multiple workspaces can share a single capacity. However, as your usage and use-cases become more varied, your organization might want to have multiple capacities of different sizes available for different purposes. In other words, you can have different levels of computing power at your disposal.

Changing the capacity that a workspace uses is a straightforward process. Based on the increased need for capacity within a specific workspace, such as heavy calculations, you can temporarily or permanently scale up the capacity of that workspace. The following illustration demonstrates how your organization’s Fabric capacity and workspaces might evolve as your experience with Fabric grows.

Security and Region Availability

Security is paramount in data solutions, and many companies have strict policies about data storage locations. Currently, Fabric Preview is not available in all regions. For example, as of writing this blog, the closest regions to Finland offering Fabric Preview are Western Europe and Eastern Norway. We hope that region availability will expand when Microsoft releases the official version. However, if a company policy dictates a specific region not currently supporting Fabric Preview, it may raise concerns about considering Fabric as an option.

Migration Strategy Dependant on Current Data Environments

Customer situations regarding their current data solutions vary greatly. Some rely solely on Excel-based reporting, while others maintain on-premises data warehouses, and some have extensive experience with cloud-based data solutions. These varying starting points influence their needs and questions concerning Fabric.

For those migrating from on-premises environments to the cloud, Microsoft Fabric provides a straightforward option, albeit requiring a clean slate approach. In contrast, businesses with existing cloud environments seek to understand how Fabric complements their current stack and its potential for hybrid solutions. The starting point of each customer significantly influences the migration effort required. Due to Fabric’s one-copy data approach, development should be faster compared to previous cloud migrations.

Conclusion

Microsoft Fabric has garnered significant interest and raised expectations among our customers. Its ability to simplify cloud infrastructure management, offer powerful data science capabilities, and address traditional challenges is compelling. However, it is essential to address concerns around product maturity, pricing, capacity management, security, and region availability before making a decision.

We at Evitec are excited about the potential that Microsoft Fabric brings to the world of data and analytics and look forward to its continued evolution.

01.09.2023 | Featured Finance News

Evitec Covered Bonds 2.0 released – major technology upgrade now available

Evitec announces the availability of Evitec Covered Bonds Release 2.0. With major technology upgrade, new features, and improvements, covered bonds issuers and institutions using Evitec Covered Bonds stay up to date in terms of legislation, regulations, and reporting requirements.

New features include:

• issuance process module 
• potential search module 
• design tool module 
• support for green pools and bonds 
• improved criteria engine 
• more extensive pool data archive 
• modern cloud-based architecture 
• enhanced security features 

With new features in place, institutions engaged in mortgage banking lessen their operational risk and ensure new requirements, EU directives and regulations are always met.

— We now have 6 out of 10 banks in Finland as our customers, so it’s only natural that we now set our sights towards rest of Europe, says Head of International Business Development, Tino Silfver.

— As the finance industry is going through a cloud transition, the new version of our market-leading Covered Bonds solution will give years of cost-efficient, agile operation, says Head of products Janne Takala.

Evitec Covered Bonds automates reporting and other crucial processes. Solution can also be used by covered bonds issuers in their transition towards greener future. Evitec Covered Bonds makes available reporting dashboards that provide information how green a bond pool is based on chosen framework. In the future, information about sustainable bonds will be made available.

Evitec attends European Covered Bonds Council 33rd Plenary meeting in Munich on 13th September.

See also our Customer stories.

20.06.2023 | Featured News

Evitec publishes Sustainability Report 2022

Evitec’s Sustainability Report of 2022 is now published. The report includes statements of commitment from our CSO, CEO, and Chairman of the Board, reflection on our Sustainability Values, our EcoVadis score and action plan, and details about our Sustainability Journey from the time period of 2022.

As the world around us turns and evolves, we strive to be a part of the positive change, or the Sustainability Revolution, as we like to refer to it. Our Sustainability Report serves as a testament to us constantly working toward a smarter, stronger, and more sustainable tomorrow.

As our CEO, Mikko Pilkama, states in his commitment letter:

— There is no better moment than this to start building a more sustainable, and a more prosperous world for all of us.

Read more about our sustainability work and motivation in the newly published report.

14.06.2023 | Featured News

Evitec’s journey towards ISO 27001 certification: raising the bar of information security

Evitec is on its journey to achieve the Information Security Management System certification in compliance with the ISO/IEC 27001:2022* standard. Target is to obtain the certification during H1 of 2024.

Purpose with the ISO 27001 standard is to enhance the overall security posture as well as provide the company a 3rd party assurance of how information security is governed. In the financial sector, where security and bank secrecy have always been paramount, coupled with GDPR requirements for personal data protection, the importance of information security is well recognized.

– We can see EU (EU’s Digital decade**) putting pressure on this matter together with directives and initiatives such as DORA and NIS2. The eyes are directed towards the critical industries, and after that towards operators’ such as us. We need to meet these demands, and ISO 27001 standard is a good and straightforward way to do it. Moreover, the certification helps us to demonstrate our commitment to customers and stakeholders, states Harri Inkinen SVP, Information Security in Evitec.

Identify risks, and then treat them

The ISO 27001 is a standard, that defines the requirements for an information security management system. The challenge lies in determining the most optimal approach to meet those requirements.

– In practice, we estimate the company’s intellectual property as well as customers’ data we want to keep safe and available, what the possible threats and risks are, and then adopt appropriate measures to manage or minimize these risks, adds Inkinen.

Complying with an ISO standard is a process that requires continuous actions from the company.

Inkinen clarifies: – Risk management is a collective responsibility. With this I refer to the fact that every piece of our intellectual property has an owner, and owners should be able to constantly identify and report threats. ISO 27001 is a risk-based standard; what should be accepted and what should be mitigated. When that is acknowledged, we have a foundation to build on.

Looking ahead to 2024

The target is to obtain ISO 27001 certification during H1 of 2024. Prior that there will be external audits conducted by accredited auditors.

– Ultimately, putting effort in information security keeps us safe, of course, but it also makes us more trustworthy partner in the markets, opening up new exciting opportunities, concludes Inkinen.

*) ISO 27001 is an information security standard created by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

**) More information: Europe’s Digital Decade

05.06.2023 | Blog Featured Insights Technology

Painting the future with Microsoft Fabric – data landscape in one frame

The data world is abuzz with excitement as Microsoft launched into public a preview of its latest offering, Microsoft Fabric. This so-called all-in-one analytics solution has generated significant market hype across the data community, promising to revolutionize and simplify the data & analytics infrastructures and bring the “data into the era of AI”. What does this all mean in practice? Take a minute and let us tell you what the Fabric is all about.

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution wrapping all the different components of data landscape together under one package. With one licence you get it all what you need for your data environment: Data Factory, Synapse, Power BI and OneLake. You don’t need to buy the different resources separately anymore; it is all included into a single service and managed and governed centrally.

OneLake = centralized data storage for all your analytics data

OneLake is the other of the most remarkable features of the Fabric, as it aims to mitigate the need of data duplication within the whole solution. You, who have been working with data infrastructures, probably know that it is common that the data needs to be duplicated across the data solution’s layers for different analytical engines to support the different use cases of the data. In OneLake the data is stored in compressed parquet-format, and all the different analytical engines within the Fabric can query the same data efficiently.

To put this in context, both T-SQL engine for building a data warehouse and Analysis Service Engine for Power BI reports can use the same data as efficiently. Microsoft promises to extend this “One copy of data“ -paradigm further by enabling shortcuts for the data, so that different teams can use the same data for their specific purposes by creating virtual data products. In addition, OneLake offers a possibility to expand the lake into some third-party data storages, such as Amazon S3, without a need to move the data physically to the OneLake. Quite impressive.

Introducing AI to empower developers

The other remarkable feature of Fabric is the inclusion of the AI within the Fabric across the solution. This means introducing Copilot into all building blocks of the Fabric to assist you in your work to increase your efficiency. For example, in the future you can ask Copilot to build a HR report for you in Power BI. Interesting to see how well this feature is going to work. With Copilot Microsoft aims to empower the citizen developers to be more integral part of the data development process and thus promote the organizations to become even more data driven. Most of the Copilot features are still in Private Preview though, so we all must wait a bit longer to get our hands on these cool new features.

More sustainable tomorrow through innovation in resource efficiency

At Evitec, we have already begun exploring the capabilities that Microsoft Fabric offers. Our own OneLake is already up and running, and we are well in our way to uncover the possibilities of Fabric. While the service is still in preview mode, and some child-diseases are expected, many of the features seem promising. We truly are impressed by its ability to eliminate the need for data duplication.

As the volume of data continues to grow in the world, so does the carbon footprint of the data storage. And as we are thriving towards more sustainable tomorrow, it is important that also the data solutions are designed to be as resource efficient as possible, and here Fabric seems to make a clear difference by having the only one copy of the data. Given of course that the processing of the data does not lose the benefits gained by reduction of the storage.

Time will tell whether Fabric can claim all the promises Microsoft has made for it, but if it does, we think that Fabric is a real game changer in the data field. Join us to the journey to unravel the potential of your data with Microsoft Fabric!

16.05.2023 | Featured News

Mikko Pilkama appointed new CEO of Evitec, with Ilkka Starck joining the Board of Directors

The Board of Directors of Evitec has appointed Mikko Pilkama, MSc (Econ), as the new CEO of the Evitec Group (Evitec). Pilkama will take on his new role 1 June.

03.05.2023 | Featured News

Evitec joins United Nations Global Compact

Evitec has been accepted to join the United Nations Global Compact (later UN GC).

By being a UN GC participant, we commit to acting responsibly and aligning our strategies and operations with the UN’s  Ten Principles  on human rights, labour, environment  and  anti-corruption. Additionally, we commit to striving towards reaching the  UN Sustainable Development Goals.

UN GC is the world’s largest sustainability compact  and has over 21,000 participants ranging from companies to other organizations to countries. The UN GC accepts commitments from companies which act responsibly towards people and the planet. In the application process we committed to setting ambitious goals and reporting on our progress annually.

The aim of the UN GC is to  mobilize a global movement of sustainable companies and stakeholders to create a more equal, transparent, and prosperous world, while caring for the environment.

Our aim at Evitec is to modernise Nordic banks and insurance companies through automation, agile methods, analytics, and cloud computing. We believe that this modernisation will lead the way to a sustainable future.

Read more about our sustainability work.

See our profile at the United Nations Global Compact portal.

18.04.2023 | Featured News

Evitec Group reports steady growth in the fiscal year 2022 

Evitec Group’s financial statement for fiscal year 2022 has been confirmed. Revenue was 37 million euros and grew with 12%, compared to the previous year (2021: 33M eur).

– 2022 reminded us again how quickly the market and business can change. Despite of the uncertain geopolitical situation we were able to deliver a decent outcome which included a successful acquisition in Sweden as well as carrying out a brand renewal process across the Nordics. What we need to keep doing during these unprecedented times, is to serve our customers excellently and maintain the mutual trust, states CEO Ilkka Starck.

Evitec’s headcount has increased from 304 to 330. Outlook for the year 2023 is solid but uncertainty in the market remains.

– We need to be cautious and follow the market development closely while executing our growth strategy, ends Starck.

For further  information  please contact: 
Evitec, CEO Ilkka Starck, Phone. +358 9 681 731