Vehicle Finance to LocalTapiola in Just Four Months
LocalTapiola is the largest insurer in Finland. It's also one of the oldest, with roots going back to the 1700s. In 2017, LocalTapiola established a new fully owned subsidiary; LocalTapiola Finance, to focus purely on providing financing for cars and machinery.
Banqsoft is the only vendor that could provide the product portfolio we wanted to offer from day one
Fully digital from day one
To help set up the new entity, LocalTapiola enlisted the help of a group of IT specialists that included Jani Leväsalo, a veteran in IT for the Nordic finance sector.
"LocalTapiola wanted to ramp up fast, so they gave us free hands with the IT choices," said Leväsalo. "We started the vendor selection work in August 2017, and by the end of September it was already clear that we would go with the View21 suite from Banqsoft."
The IT team from LocalTapiola Finance worked closely with Banqsoft to get the solution up and running in just under four months, implementing modules for handling credit applications, daily transactions, reporting and stock financing.
Leväsalo says he wanted the system to be robust and automated from day one - this was so his team could focus their future efforts on development for business needs, instead of being tied up maintaining a system that couldn't handle growth.
I wanted a system that would still be viable in 2030.
"This was a massive technological investment in the beginning. But now we have the right environment to scale with the business and we don't need to worry about buying additional servers, disc space and memory."
We have not built a single function that cannot be automated or digitized. When the customer goes to the car dealer, the system can check everything automatically. Time to money can be less than one hour.
"For this level of automation, you need a system where you can trust that all the data is correct. Banqsoft's View 21 provides excellent capabilities to do just that.“
"If I had to choose an IT vendor again, I would go with Banqsoft. I don't think any other company could have performed an implementation like this in less than four months," states Leväsalo.
Freedom to customize
LocalTapiola Finance has implemented View21 as an ASP (Application Service Provider) model, hosting the technical infrastructure themselves.
Leväsalo says this brings the predictability the company needs, while also giving his team the freedom to configure the solution as they need. The ASP model also gives his team the ability to use
View21’s APIs and open architecture to enhance system features for custom processes at LocalTapiola Finance.
Fast ramp up, bright future
Less than two years since its launch, LocalTapiola Finance has become the third largest provider of vehicle financing in Finland, with some 32.000 accounts.
"This is a much faster acceleration than we had expected," says Leväsalo. "We started with five employees, and now there are 31 of us. The full product portfolio is up and running, and now we are working on expanding the business."
"Banqsoft was key in helping us get to this point. They provided their best resources and they understood us and our needs well to deliver what was needed. If I had to choose an IT vendor again, I would definitely make the same decision."
Banqsoftâs product suite View21 is simply the most suitable system for the Nordic financing sector.