Nokia Enablers for Fintech - Kristian Pullola, Nokia, D.Day for Fintech

So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nokia's own event. On my behalf, it's an honor to be hosting this event on this special day, the eve of our century celebrations. Nokia is today a global technology leader at the heart of our connected world. We build the components of connectivity for the future world. We all know that the world is changing. We will change the world by bringing 5G technology to the market, technology that will enable new things to be done by machines as well as people. We have today a very broad and deep product portfolio of services and products and licensing that make us an attractive partner for operators, for large enterprises, governments, as well as for customers. Having said that, I will actually not talk about that today. I will talk about something different. I'll focus today's few minutes on what we have done as Nokia in the FinTech space. So I'll talk about how a customer, a B2B customer, has been leveraging FinTech over the last 30 years and how we've approached it, what we have learned, what we will do next, and I will highlight that we are open for business. We want to be an active partner in the FinTech ecosystem also in the future for those who want to work in the B2B space. Having listened to the earlier speeches, it seems that the consumer space is the most sexy space in FinTech to be in, but I can assure you that there is also money to be made in the B2B space if you can solve the real-life problems that companies like ourselves face on a daily basis.

Okay, so what have we done? I'm pretty sure that 30 years ago when we started our FinTech journey, we were not using the term. Nobody talked about FinTech. We really talked about solving problems in a world that was very different to the world that we live in today. It was more regulated, it was more manual, it was less global, it was less developed, and it actually had a lot of borders and restrictions that one had to deal with. We started our FinTech journey in the area of payments, trying to make fewer of them, trying to make them more efficient. The one critical thing was that we wrote our code from the get-go. We had people who were doing this work. And why did we do that? Because there were no off-the-shelf products to solve the problems that we were solving, particularly in a world where not that many companies were international at that stage. We then moved on to messaging because we knew that messaging was an enabler for automation. The fact that you knew who the payment was coming from for what invoice was critical to start the automation of the internal processes within any company. We then moved forward to be an active participant when developing the first electronic trading platforms for currency trading as well as for liquidity management. We did this to be able to cope with the increased transaction volumes that we were facing without the need to increase headcount. On the eve of the financial crisis, we actually moved on to join SWIFT. Why did we do that? We did that to improve the communications with banks and with the aim of actually making ourselves bank agnostic during a time when you didn't know which payment provider would be around the next day because they were falling left, right, and center. But it was really about how do you become bank agnostic and deal with the risks that we were facing at that point of time. This has been a continuous process that we have been on for many years. We have pushed into other areas beyond payments. We have improved our processes within the area of trade finance, and we are now enabling new solutions for our supply chain financing solutions and trying to take that to the next level.

So what has then enabled this? First and foremost, it's pretty simple: you need passionate, professional people who are willing to push the boundaries. Without those people, nothing will happen. You need those people within the company, but you also need those people within the partners that you work with. We have clearly not been on this journey alone. We have worked with banks and other players, and they have been critical in the process. We have worked with players who have been willing to be open to disruption and to new ways of working. We have worked with partners who have been willing to be open, standards-based, and to support an approach where ultimately we want to be bank agnostic and drive the efficiencies and benefits that come from that. I'm pretty proud of how the team at Nokia has been working with the partners, and I would summarize that in a couple of words: it's about respecting the partners you work with and it's about professional behavior in all of those encounters. Another critical enabler has been a very tight collaboration between the operational activities and the developments that we have been running. When we reflected back on this some months ago, we realized that we have actually worked in a DevOps environment before the whole term was created. And what that meant was that we were striking the right balance between trying to bring rapid increments to market as well as then investing in the time and effort that it takes to build platforms and create the architectures that enable you to take the enjoyment leaps from time to time. But I think the learning here is that that balance is really critical: how you work on both incremental value as well as the enabling technologies that take you forward. A standards-driven approach as well as data is very critical. We have had access to some unique data given our global set-up that has helped us develop the different things that we have developed during this area. The whole modularity of the development is also very critical because from that modularity comes the fact that you can actually learn from one area into another area. A good example is that we put a lot of effort on payments, and then we realized that some of the development that we had done in the area of payments was really relevant in the area of trade finance also, and that is now actually one of the areas where we are investing a lot. The trading platforms I talked about, the trading platforms is really an area where we pushed the boundaries together with the industry, and it helped create some of the solutions that are being leveraged by people today.

The benefits of all this are pretty clear: you get automation, you get strong monitoring processes that you can rely on, which means that the people you have will be less involved in the actual activities, and we like to work on the more value-adding things as well as resolving the problems that your automated processes can't deal with. We have also gone all the way through the different disruptions that the company has gone through. The FinTech products that we have had have helped us kind of work through divestments and acquisitions. The critical thing here is also that you need those internal people to accumulate the knowledge from the different projects that you can leverage going forward. We've done this with the same amount of resources during the times. So today we have a fairly automated set-up in the basic areas of corporate finance activities, and we have the capability and the willingness to develop this forward. There are a few areas which we are attacking next. As I said before, it is about being more efficient in the area of trade finance as well as taking the next steps when it comes to working with suppliers and the way the whole supply chain is being financed. Pushing the boundaries of standards and leveraging the next set of technologies in the activities is critical. That's why, as I said, please challenge us. If you want to work with an international company who is willing to invest in this space, you can contact us. We are ready to work together with you guys and to push for new innovation. With that, I thank you for your attention.