Swedbank in Finland
Helping Swedbank to start its operations in Finland was Icefire’s first experience on international market. As Swedbank decided to follow his key customers who entered the Finnish market in 2005, they needed to open the operations there fast. Thus, they faced the challenge to have a fully functional Banking System, that would comply with all the local regulations, implemented and integrated with the corporate systems in Stockholm, within the shortest possible time-frame.
There was carried out short tender, including internationally well-known companies from Sweden and Finland. Icefire was chosen to carry out the project, mainly because the proposed timeline of project- it was the shortest and enabled to start the banking operations already in 6 months.
For Icefire, this project was actually beyond just building and implementing another Information System.
First, we had to study and understand the whole set of Finnish regulations and standards, including the Central Bank requirements, rules for National Clearing, as well as very specific standards for communications and security (some of which dated back even to the beginning of 90-s). In order to meet the deadline, all this learning work had to be done within less than two months.
Next, all the Swedbank’s corporate business processes had to be understood and adjusted to the Finnish legislation. To complete it within just couple of months, (as the project plan requested), it required very intense co-operation with the Headquarters in Stockholm.
The software itself was developed on basis of Swedbank Baltic’s Banking System, which
supported most of the functionality needed to offer corporate banking services. However, it still needed significant amount of development and customisation in order to support the defined processes. Also, integration with the Swedbank’s corporate systems (e.g. S.W.I.F.T and corporate reporting) had to be built.
Another challenging part of the project was to carry out integration with the Finnish external counterparties. The banking System was integrated with the Multibanking Software (e.g. Opus Capita), used by Finnish corporate customers. Integration with Finnish Local Clearing Network was, among the other tasks, included one-to-one tests with each single member, which was one of the most interesting tasks from the Project Management point of view.
Swedbank launched it’s operations on Finnish market 6 months from the beginning of the project. However, significant amount of functionality was implemented at the later development stages. Today, we continously carrying out the development of the amendments and changes needed (e.g. SEPA regulations).