Nordea develops its business operations in a research project with TUT and Tieto
“We have achieved interesting results relating to the provision of banking and insurance services and the value that customers place on these services, as well as concrete indications of the direction in which we could develop our services,” says Raimo Voutilainen, Executive Vice President at Nordea Life Assurance Finland Ltd.
The Tampere University of Technology project, “Comprehensive financial services for SMEs and the business models required for them” (FiKoPa), has investigated means to implement overall solutions related to risk management and monetary processes that will help companies to meet the changing requirements of the business world.
“We aim to improve our understanding of our customers’ businesses,” says Tieto’s business consultant Ilkka Lähteenmäki. He explains why Tieto started the project with Tampere University of Technology and Tekes three years ago:
“There was clearly a lack of banking research in Finland, although demand existed both among companies and the academic community.”
Nordea has been one of the most active operators in FiKoPa.
“We aim to enhance our business logic. We started looking for relevant research results that could be applied to product development, offerings development and sales,” says Raimo Voutilainen.
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Useful research results for developing services
Voutilainen, who has been closely involved in the research work, gives praise to the project’s concrete study areas and useful results. He says the research results will help Nordea to develop banking and insurance services.
“The most important results for Nordea include the study on protecting human resources in SMEs using insurance. For us, it is self-evident that insurance can be used to protect personnel but this has not been noted in the literature or scientifically proven,” Voutilainen says.
The scientific evidence will help Nordea to market and sell insurance related to the protection of human resources. Another study important for the bank is connected with the cross-sales of banking and insurance products. According to Voutilainen, Nordea received clear indications on how to make cross-sales more effective.
“The banking and insurance sector has not paid sufficient attention to cross-selling. The concept as a whole has been up in the air as regards SMEs. The financial sector is well equipped to sell comprehensive solutions containing banking and insurance to SMEs,” he says.
Unique scientific collaboration
According to Lähteenmäki, it is important for Tieto to know what is happening in the financial world and what Tieto’s customers need. Scientific research is a good way of gaining a picture of what the requirements and customer needs will be in the future.
“We need to know how a customer can operate competitively in the changing markets. We are continuously acquiring new information that helps us draw a picture of the future of the financial sector. This helps us develop solutions that genuinely serve customers,” he says.
Both Lähteenmäki and Voutilainen consider FiKoPa to be a good example of fruitful and functioning co-operation between different organisations.
“Scientific co-operation in the financial sector has been minimal. We need more of this kind of research and co-operation,” says Voutilainen.
The project is set to continue.
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