MuniFin reimagines public sector finance and risk management for Finland

Finland has one of the most advanced public sectors in the world, with one of the highest spends per capita on government projects. As the average age of the Finnish population continues to grow, structural changes in society put increasing pressure on these government projects, as costs rise yet budgets remain fixed.

Municipality Finance (MuniFin), as Finland’s second largest credit institution, and the only institution solely focused on public sector financing and  risk management, is constantly looking for new ways to increase operational efficiencies and to help the government meet its evolving goals. MuniFin turned to Openlink to help unify its  accounting  and risk management, to improve transparency across the business and to provide a single source of truth for deal management. Moving to the Openlink  Findur  platform means that the MuniFin accounting team no longer has to manually input trading data into two different systems and has a direct link with other vendor systems.

“Previously we had a front-office system, a back-office system and legacy systems. To have straight-through processing makes accounting a lot easier and provides enhanced visibility,” said Rosi Veijalainen, Business Controller, Municipality Finance.

To find the right solution, the MuniFin IT team worked closely with the Openlink Professional Services team to build a platform that scales with their business. The project began by replacing the legacy systems that managed their capital market products. As the project unfolded, it touched almost every MuniFin function, from front-, middle- and back-office operations, to customer finance. The team adopted Openlink’s straight-through processing (STP) model, which introduced benefits like automated reconciliations.

As Jennifer Broker, Senior Vice President of Openlink Professional Services points out, “One key attribute of our platform is the ease of configuration. We’ve won awards for this. The platform is incredibly flexible yet not too daunting when it comes to initial setup.”

As a result, the accounting team could move away from inputting data into multiple systems and could focus on utilizing their expertise on higher value tasks such as analyzing data and building forecasts into daily operations. The Openlink platform also helps MuniFin easily address new complex European Central Bank regulatory standards.

MuniFin’s Business Solutions Manager Jani Laisi says, “We are looking forward to analyze what kind of social impact our financial solutions have on Finnish society.”