Development of Evitec Solutions Bonds is carried out in an agile and educational way
Osku Airesto is in charge of leading the Evitec Solutions Bonds team, while Product Manager Tino Silfver has been closely involved in product development and more recently in international sales.
Evitec Solutions Bonds automates complex covered bond pooling processes. It is a customised ERP system, designed to facilitate mortgage banks’ maintenance operations and automatically handle most of the steps in the process, including cash flow calculations and analysis.
The majority of the development work is carried out by a team of around a dozen Evitec IT experts in Tampere. The team is led by Osku Airesto, while Product Manager Tino Silfver is closely involved in product development and sales. The Bonds team currently provides services, including development and maintenance, for five clients.
Nearly all team members are involved in full-stack development, referring to the coding of both the front end and the back end. This means that the same team essentially takes care of the implementation and maintenance of the database, software logic and user interface. The UI and service design also benefits from the valuable help of our UX team.
“While people naturally have some areas of specialisation, for instance AWS cloud services, our main principle is that all team members are able to work on any solution development task,” Osku explains. “This means that maintenance responsibilities are distributed evenly as well, and our competent team is always ready to help the client with any problems they might have.”
Agile team work with an emphasis on customer experience
The Evitec Solutions Bonds team carries out development work in two-week sprints. In the current remote work environment, Slack and Teams provide an efficient means of keeping in touch. Maintenance and development are carried out side by side in an agile manner. Making sure that the services function properly and ensuring the client’s experience of good service and added value are very important for both the Bonds team and Evitec Solutions, for which high customer satisfaction is an essential operating principle. When there’s less work to be done in maintenance, development takes centre stage.
“Our team is understandably quite close-knit, since we work towards a big, shared goal on a long-term basis, but we’ve also acquired some new members and the team has grown over the years,” Osku says. “Providing training to new professionals and people who are just starting their careers is important to us.”
The business logic of covered bond pooling is rather sophisticated — and therefore also quite challenging to adopt. At the beginning, each team member gets support from their own mentor in addition to the team leader. Learning is facilitated in every possible way. More experienced professionals will help their new colleagues get up to speed, and all kinds of questions are encouraged.
The operating model has proven very fruitful, and both the team members and clients have been satisfied. The team members and ways of working are constantly developing and improving – just like the Evitec Solutions Bonds solution.
