OP Financial Group’s brand vision is to act as a forerunner for a more hopeful future, which also guides technological development strongly. In recent years, the company has taken significant steps toward more advanced technology solutions. The latest effort involving the entire group is the cloud migration, which means transferring the organisation’s IT architecture as a whole to the cloud environment.

The leader of OP’s technology unit, Antti Hoikkala, takes care of the cloud migration strategy and answers for defining the Group’s common operating models and directions. When upper-level guidelines have been created, the actual implementation of the migration is performed swiftly by the Group’s various business segments, tribes and teams. It is not so much about a development project during a certain time period as continuous development that aims to generate always more efficient practices for OP and to improve services for customers. 

“Our main objective is not finishing the cloud migration as a project and in a way, we never will. Instead, we try to adopt a working model through which we develop and reinvent everything we do continously”, explains Antti.  

Agility is key in a developing organisation 

As a financial sector player, OP is one of the largest pioneers in Finland. It aims strongly to also become a forerunner in technological development. Even though cloud migrations have been implemented by Finnish companies previously, OP’s change journey is historical on its own scale.  

“We always talk openly about our technological updates to the outside world, and it’s also our responsibility due to the size of our company. Through cloud migration, we can act as an example to other large companies and organisations on how such a big-scale transformation can be accomplished”, describes Antti.  

A significant change before the cloud migration was the agile operating model typical for software companies, implemented at OP since 2019. The main principles of this operating method are customer focus, ability to react, self-management and transparency. Its goal is to improve work continuously and efficiently. On a culture and personnel level, the model has been implemented well during the past years, and the distributed and agile operations brought by cloud migration can really be implemented in technology work.  

“The models currently used to develop cloud services enable fulfilling the promise of an agile organisation. On a practical level, this means, for example, that each team can build a new type of service independently, efficiently and according to the need for even small customer groups as a separate whole”, summarises Antti.

Toward a more hopeful future through continuous reinventing  

For technology, OP has already implemented model changes to accomplish better solutions, starting from mainframe machines to client service-based applications, and most recently microservice-based solutions.  

The cloud migration is an essential step forward, because the latest technological innovations are built on cloud services. When everything is centralised in a common cloud architecture, developers can build services that are of better quality, faster and independent of channels, from versatile AI solutions to interactive user interfaces. However, technology in itself is not the only priority in the migration, as the change also requires the critical scrutiny of practices.  

“This migration is not only about implementing new technologies. It also involves changing our practices completely – the cloud is the world we are all heading into. If we don’t proceed with a sufficient revamping spirit and open mind away from old models, we lose many opportunities”, emphasises Antti.  

In order to make the cloud service as reliable, scalable and data secure according to regulation, the continuous development of competencies is a vital part of the migration. To support learning, OP offers, in cooperation with Microsoft, an extensive studying environment to employees working in cloud expert roles and moving into them. This environment contains both basic studies and customised packages. Even though technologies change a lot for many experts, they have started to learn new skills with an open and enthusiastic mind.   

“OP’s technology experts share a spirit of reinventing things and a passion for interesting innovations. Now our entire organisation gets to build something special and meaningful for the whole country quickly and with new energy, which is absolutely fantastic”, rejoices Antti.