Providing financial institutions with the best software platform to improve operational efficiency

Having searched for more than a decade to find a secure IT application to streamline its operations, PensionDanmark’s long search ended in 2019 when it partnered with Festina Finance, transforming the way it does business.

Serving the needs of PensionDanmark members has been a central part of Denmark’s largest public pension fund since it was first set up in 1992.

As one of the top 50 largest pension funds in Europe, with EUR 36bn under management and 780,000 members, it has five key values: openness, commitment to its members, professionalism, accountability, and innovation.

But to achieve its goal of providing the best service to its members, the firm came to a realisation in 2018 that it needed an IT partner that shared its commitment to using new technology to innovate.

“We wanted an administrative tool that was a departure from the complex and bloated IT systems that were widely used throughout the industry,” says Flemming Tovdal Schmidt, the chief operations officer at PensionDanmark.

Faster calculations of the disposable amount available and a visual overview for the customer make Festina Advisor central when the bank advisors at Sparekassen Kronjylland create good customer experiences.

Most of life’s big decisions and events affect the private economy. This relates to when you are buying the house of your dreams, a new sports car, or when you are planning to have children or get married. But when you dream, you also risk losing grip with reality, and the financial situation becomes a necessary evil which commands attention.

In those situations, some customers will fear a meeting at the bank where the bank advisor may destroy the dreams because the customer’s disposable amount simply is too small. And the disappointment is especially great if the customers do not have a good understanding of why they have been rejected. As the credit rating often is a black box for customers, Sparekassen Kronjylland works with an advisory tool that delivers transparency and a foundation for a focused and improved dialogue between advisors and customers.

”We want to give our customers a thorough understanding of how their finances are affected by life’s big decisions. Festina Advisor is a flexible system that includes all aspects of customers’ personal finances. We can discuss different scenarios with the customers without making advanced calculations for every little change. At the same time, it is an excellent visual tool so that we can easily explain to customers the reasons for their credit rating,” says Kasper Frydenholm, Customer Advisor at Sparekassen Kronjylland.

Middelfart Sparekasse has launched a new IT system called Advisor that will contribute greatly towards the daily tasks that its advisors perform for its customers. The savings bank believes the system will free up time for customers and improve the customer experience.

Many life-changing decisions require a visit to the bank, whether  it is moving to a new job in another part of the country, the arrival of a second child or buying a cottage by the beach. The  relationship between the advisor and customer plays an essential role, according to Middelfart Sparekasse.

“Although many things are becoming digitalized, we believe that we can make a difference by meeting the customer in person. We support them when they make life-changing decisions and we generate trust by meeting face-to-face,”
says Kristian Gren, who manages  marketing and business development at the bank.

At the start of 2015, following careful consideration with its clients, SDC implemented a digital advisory solution based on Festina Finance’s Advisor.

The SDC Group supplies IT services to more than 120 banks in the Nordic region, consisting of approximately 3 million banking customers. Headquartered in Denmark, SDC provides modern IT applications and infrastructure to support its clients’ business development, increasing their competitive edge with all-round solutions that create added value across national boundaries.

“The banks we work with have competitive products and great employees. Our role is to give them the quality tools needed to remain the natural contact point for people looking for financial advice,” says Jesper Scharff, CEO of SDC.

SDC looked beyond traditional advisory solutions and found Festina Finance to be an ideal solution and collaborative partner. Niels Aagaard Lorenzen, head of business development at SDC, explains:
“Working closely with Festina Finance, we now have a solution that is very easy to use. It is what we call a pure ‘drag and drop’ banking solution.”

Hinckley & Rugby Building Society has gone live with a digital system developed by Festina Finance to speed up the mortgage process.

Its mortgage team can process the customer interview, generate a Decision in Principle, instantly compare products and terms plus predict timescales. Ongoing development will see a personalised self-service online platform introduced later in 2019 for customers to use themselves.

Dean Waddingham, chief customer officer at Hinckley & Rugby, said: “The collaboration with Festina Finance illustrates Hinckley & Rugby’s forward-looking approach to working with fintech pioneers to enhance its offer.“

Hinckley & Rugby BS cut rate on 95% mortgage
The first step alone is a game changing innovation which will quicken each application’s journey from enquiry to completion.
It supports our staff adviser and the customer, from streamlining a smarter interview and Fact Find to improving the efficiency of the subsequent processing to deliver a quicker outcome.

In 2016, PFA began investigating how it could further develop the retirement planning advice available to all of its customers via its ‘My PFA’ solution.

In particular, PFA wanted clients to be able to further take into account selling or releasing value from the client’s private real estate, equities, bonds and cash and optimize the pay-out plan given the customer’s needs. .

“We aimed to offer state of the art retirement planning by using the best available tools needed to remain the natural contact point for PFA’s customers close to or on retirement,” says Line Jørgensen, Head of Savings Products & Recommendations at PFA.

PFA looked beyond traditional advisory solutions to the new types of digital services now available. The company was attracted to Festina’s Advisor system because of the ability to input and visualise all of a customer’s assets and create different “what if” scenarios when putting together a retirement plan.

A variety of data sources and an intuitive user interface is helping financial advisors communicate clearly with their customers.

In 2013, Lån & Spar Bank was drawing up plans about the future customer experience for its clients.

“We decided that all data about a customer’s financial situation should be available in an easily accessible form when meeting with that customer. Our vision was that it should be easy to play around with different financial scenarios together with the customer,” explains Casper Gjerris, CIO & COO at Lån & Spar Bank.

Gjerris and his staff thought they had to build a new advisory system on their own, but a demonstration of the Advisor system from Festina Finance in 2014 changed their minds.

“We realised immediately that there was a very good match between our requirements and their system,” Gjerris says.

From Wealth Management to Financial Advice
The only challenge was that the system was not directly targeting banking.

“The Advisor system is based on several iterations from the founder Morten Schantz’ more than 25 years’ experience in developing advisory systems for the insurance and pension industry,” explains Mikael Braagaard, CEO at Festina Finance.