Energizing the ‘Giant Leap’ in the Financial Sphere with Technology and Innovation

Finnvera is a specialized financing institution that provides financing for the start, growth, and internationalization of enterprises and guarantees against risks arising from exports. Finnvera strengthens the operating potential and competitiveness of Finnish enterprises. 

A Tech-Savvy Leader

Tuomas Kaulio is the CIO of Finnvera. He is a pragmatic and development-driven IT leader. He has worked as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) for over ten years now, first in telecommunications and then in the financial services domain at Finnvera. His work builds on a deep understanding of technology and experience in developing agile and lean operations in a DevOps manner. 

Real-Life Experiences: Making the Impossible Possible

Tuomas says that at the beginning of his CIO journey, his team succeeded to turn around the development process of a medium-sized Norwegian company by going into agile development. From the scattered agile island, the team combined a unified agile way of working throughout the organization. The outcome of the change was staggering; the development throughput increased by 100% in a short time period even though the resources did not change. Similarly, business satisfaction with IT skyrocketed. Tuomas exclaims that this was a dream come true for a young CIO. The Norwegian team was very competent and that made the change possible. Tuomas mentions that he is still thankful for them. Since then, he has learned a great deal more about how important change management can be at all levels of an organization.

Creating an Inclusive Environment 

Tuomas presumes that it was important for him to learn how to energize and motivate people, and at the same time, to maintain a pragmatic and solution-oriented approach. He claims that it is the people in companies who produce the outcomes and not only the CIO himself.

Promoting Customer-Centric Services to Meet Targets 

Typically, the role of the CIO is to make the change possible. Tuomas reveals that when he gets a possibility to influence, he promotes using service design methods in development. This is because the service design methods have an in-built customer feedback loop for the development artifacts. He recalls that some years ago, the team had a chance to introduce the ‘Google design sprint’ service design method to one of the online service projects. Like many others, the company found out it was the customers and potential customers who had to tell the team developers obvious matters regarding the usability of the online service.

Espousing Business Goals with Technology 

According to Tuomas, what matters is the outcome, not the technology itself. If the company is able to achieve the target more optimally by utilizing new technology, only then the use of new technology become relevant. Sometimes in the RFP process, a tenderer is able to gain a competitive edge compared to others with new technology. Thus, as long as the technology meets certain minimum criteria, he cares less about the technology itself and rather puts more emphasis on how the technology performs in the hands of the tenderer and what outcomes it produces. He phrases it as “Let the best technology win in the hands of the most skillful tenderer”. 

He adds that, for example, the team recently completed procurement of low-code technology and the technology-related development partner. It was interesting to see how differently the low-code technologies performed. Moreover, they also identified significant differences among the vendors who were competing with the same technology. As generally known, also procurement showed that it is not only the technology but also the people and their competencies around the technology that make the difference. 

Sometimes technology really makes the difference. Tuomas mentions that the team had a chance to experiment with AI-based solutions for the analysis of customer feedback. Using a commercial purpose-built AI tool, the insight of the customer experience was analyzed in seconds. AI managed to grasp the relevant message from the feedback data and presented findings in the order of relevance. Thus, with the help of AI, the manual work effort required to analyze and gather data may be avoided. The company has the opportunity to direct the manual work effort more to value-adding activities. In the case of Finnvera, a more value-adding activity was the actual improvement of customer experience.

As the development cycles are shortening over the years, Tuomas thinks that the role of a leader should nowadays focus more on innovation methods rather than on matters being innovated. 

‘Customer Orientation’ as a Trigger to Success

Tuomas sees customer orientation as the key. To be more precise, he thinks it is all about how the customer (or internal customer) feels about IT. According to him, it is vital for a CIO to clearly communicate with non-techies. He adds that the CIOs should also have the ability to listen and talk with technical subject matter experts. He has tried to create an environment where all techies interact effectively and understand each other. All this may sound trivial and self-evident, but it actually is not as easy as it sounds. Tuomas reveals that he has experienced many critical situations where the subject matter experts have misunderstood each other without the experts themselves even realizing it, regardless of the location and the company.  

Creating a Fascinating Ecosystem with Futuristic Tech 

Tuomas considers the future fascinating. He says that with a brilliant team, Finnvera needs to adapt to continuous change. New technologies will enable financial institutions to process and analyze significantly larger data sets in a short time frame. Tuomas predicts that it will bring completely new ways of achieving the targets.

Words of Wisdom for Emerging CIOs

Tuomas advises aspiring CIOs to put focus on the outcomes. He concludes that technology is just a means to achieve the targets. 

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