What Nordic banks and insurers told me about scaling AI — Part 2 of my CEO blog series.
Our strategy at Evitec Solutions rests on three pillars: People, Offering, and Customers. In my previous blog, I explored what it means to become AI-driven while keeping people at the heart of everything. Now I want to share what I’ve learned from our customers.
During my first quarter, I made it a priority to meet as many customers as possible. These conversations showed me what financial institutions are really dealing with right now.
Every client I met is actively working with AI. Maturity levels differ, but adoption itself is no longer up for debate. What keeps coming up is how to move forward without increasing regulatory and operational risk.
A familiar challenge keeps surfacing, though. AI pilots show promise, but turning them into real, business-critical production systems is hard. And the more I listened, the more I realised that what holds organisations back comes down to one word: trust.
Our clients — banks and insurers across the Nordics — operate in environments where regulation is strict, complexity is high, and the tolerance for error is low. Technology must earn trust before it earns a place in production. AI initiatives stall because legacy systems and siloed data limit what can scale. Compliance requirements demand a level of transparency that many AI solutions can’t yet deliver. And AI behaviour remains difficult to test, explain, and audit the way financial regulators expect.
The bar keeps rising, too. With regulations like the EU AI Act, many AI use cases in financial services will be classified as high-risk. Institutions must demonstrate data quality, human oversight, robustness, and continuous monitoring. Good intentions aren’t enough — AI that cannot be tested, explained, or governed will not scale.
Our vision at Evitec is to be an AI-driven trusted partner, setting the Nordic standard in financial technology. These customer conversations made it very concrete for me what that means day to day. It comes down to three things: experience, structure, and proof.
First, experience. We speak from our own. Over the past year, we’ve put real time and effort into exploring AI across our operations — finding the best use cases, testing tools carefully, and tracking results. Development tasks that used to take a week now get done in two days. Prototyping cycles have shortened by two to five days. Content production has become 200–300% faster. These are real numbers from our own work, and every AI tool goes through our security and compliance checks before we adopt it.
Then, structure. Our Data & AI team now has dedicated resources focused on helping clients apply AI in practice. We’ve documented responsible AI guidelines across the company. This shapes how we work with our clients: we integrate AI into core systems and end-to-end processes, make sure data is traceable and auditable, and help manage governance, compliance, and operational risk. Not as isolated pilots, but as production-ready solutions that stand up to regulatory scrutiny.
And proof. We recently brought together 60 financial sector professionals for a hands-on AI event. We partnered with Verified and 3rd Eyes Analytics because we knew the conversation needed more perspectives than ours alone. One of the speakers, Juha Volotinen from MuniFin, shared openly what makes AI projects fail in financial organisations. From Elo’s Kati Korhonen-Yrjänheikki we heard what AI means for work ability and leadership. Ville Voipio, Chair of the Board at Teknologiateollisuus ry and Vaisala showed us that the pace of change is measured in weeks and months, not years. At the workshop stations, expert teams demonstrated working AI solutions for regulatory monitoring and contract generation, explored the path from legacy systems to an AI-native future and demonstrated how investment advisory can reach a new level with the help of AI.
The event tells you something about how we approach things. We lead with practical content and open conversation and let the results speak for themselves. Participants told us they gained concrete ideas they can put to work, and the event scored an NPS of 67.
And there’s more to come. This month we’re at Di Försäkring in Stockholm meeting with Swedish insurance decision-makers, and in March in Finland we’re co-hosting an AI & Agent Lab together with Microsoft. We want to be where our customers are, talking about what they’re dealing with right now.
If your organization is looking for a partner who can help you scale AI responsibly and get it into production, I’d welcome the conversation. See how Evitec can help, or reach out to me directly.
In my next post, I’ll look at how we’re evolving our solutions to meet these needs — and what it means to build technology that financial institutions can rely on for the long term.
