Marko Voutilainen, CEO at Aico catches up with GlobalFintechSeries to talk about Aico’s new Transaction Matching solution while discussing the latest trends impacting fintech:
Hi Marko, tell us about yourself and your journey in the B2B tech realm. We’d also like to know more about Aico and how it’s evolved as a platform over the years.
I have been working in the B2B tech industry all my career for over 25 years. I started my early career in global consulting companies and quite soon ended up founding my own consulting company back in 2001. At that time, our focus was on Oracle Financial ERP consulting and development, which gave us a good background for the later-stage Aico platform.
Aico has been a long evolution that started back in 2008 as a customer-ordered consulting project to solve a specific problem for one of our key customers related to manual journal entry approvals and auditability. We then realized that there could be a wider demand for this kind of solution. So, we launched our first product under the brand eMemo. As a product, it was a client / server-based product, which was typical during that time. eMemo as a product was customized for each customer, which made it resource-consuming to develop.
Around 2016, we saw that there was a bigger demand for cloud-based solution, so we decided to rearchitect eMemo to become a fully web-application and cloud-capable product. We ended up launching the Aico – Financial Close Automation platform in 2019 as SaaS software and, since then, have continued heavily investing in platform development to expand its capabilities.
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We’d love the highlights on Aico’s latest transaction matching feature and how it can enable end-users?
Transaction Matching is our latest product in the Aico platform, and like other Aico products, it cooperates seamlessly with other Aico products. Matching different sources is easy, but we offer different possibilities to process your transaction using the rest of the Aico platform, using automation and good user experience. Synergy to the closing process is something new we bring to the market.
Our new Transaction Matching solution enables enterprises to match thousands of transactions from any data source automatically with the click of a button. With Aico’s single platform, users can directly post journals, clear open items, substantiate General Ledger accounts and assign action items to request support from colleagues, as well as track all other closing and account reconciliation activities.
For example, during a test with a German enterprise, Aico seamlessly integrated 93,093 transactions from bank statements and the ERP system into the Aico platform. The Aico automation engine then accurately matched 99% of transactions in two minutes, eliminating the need for laborious manual Excel processes and saving hours, if not days, of manual work.
Of the total transactions processed, 82,062 were automatically matched, demonstrating the system’s ability to facilitate one-to-one value matching effortlessly. Meanwhile, the remaining 10,897 transactions were proposed matches, indicative of Aico’s adeptness in identifying correlations based on the one-to-many principle.
Please share your thoughts on the impact of AI on fintech and how you feel this will change the game for the industry down the line?
I can see that it will affect multiple levels, and change is already ongoing. At Aico, we are using Generative AI tools to boost software development and plan to implement AI capabilities into the Aico software to enhance product capabilities and increase our customers’ effectiveness. I’m excited to see where the industry is in the next 12 months.
Five thoughts and tips you’d leave every fintech founder and CEO with before we wrap up.
Here are some of my learnings from this long journey:
1. Build a winning team that you can trust. You cannot do this alone
2. Ensure your product has real key differentiators that customers appreciate
3. Build a growth culture in your company
4. Always have a plan for different scenarios; your plans fail from time to time
5. Have a solid financial plan to ensure that you focus on growing your business
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[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
Aico is an end-to-end financial close software platform for large enterprises
Marko Voutilainen is the CEO of Aico – Intelligent Finance Automation Platform. He is a seasoned professional with 20+ years of experience and possesses expertise in strategy, leadership, and scaling businesses, specifically in the areas of financial automation. With a strong focus on customer success, Marko is driven to deliver innovative solutions that drive organizational growth. Prior to his role at Aico, Marko held leadership positions at Attido Oy and Cygate Oy, where he honed his skills in executive management, operations, and consulting. He also gained valuable expertise as a senior consultant at Oracle.
