Scan Magazine | Special Theme | FinTech Spotlight
Quick, in-depth insights into your financial situation Most of us know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to gain any real overview into the way that financial decisions might impact our personal finances long-term. Now, a secure and highly detailed digital simulator, Festina Advisor, has been created by Danish company Festina Finance led by Morten Schantz. Advisor allows individuals, households and businesses to view the exact effects that events such as buying a house, a car, changing jobs or making an investment will have on their budgets. By Louise Older Steffensen | Photos: Festina Finance
With more than 25 years of experience as an IT consultant for well-known firms such as Visa, Codan and Danica Pension, Schantz is no newcomer to the world of finance and technology. In 2007, the company he had built on the side since 1993 was deemed the best and most profitable software company in Denmark by Computerworld. He eventually sold the business, and began to look around for the next big thing. “I’d had the idea for a very long time that a software simulation to predict finan100 | Issue 104 | September 2017
cial outcomes could be very useful for financial industries such as banking, insurance, pensions and so forth,” Schantz explains. He set up the company Festina Finance, which today features an IT solution that helps to empower its users financially and boasts an array of happy employees from all around the world (the company was awarded the Great Place to Work certification in 2017). “We’re really proud to have such an international workforce with us here in Denmark,” Festina Finance’s CEO Mikael
Braagaard says. “When you work in different markets, it’s important to have people with in-depth knowledge of that particular region, so that the simulation system can be fitted to the specific conditions and available information of that market.” Festina Finance currently works primarily with banks, pension funds and building societies, which either make Advisor available as a service to their customers or use Advisor to build up an accurate prediction of future finances when advising their clients financially. In Denmark, Festina Finance is currently modifying a version of Advisor according to the needs of SDC, a co-operation of more than 120 Nordic banks, and their customers in other Nordic countries will gradually be able to use the service from 2018. The insurance and pensions management company Edlund has also launched its own version of Advisor,