Introduction [00:00:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: Welcome to ProptechOS Best of Breed podcast. Today I have with me Andreas Wallén from Akelius Technology, and we are going to talk about how Andreas and Akelius used their software, their ERP software for administration to enhance efficiency. We’ll discuss the journey Andreas has been on with Akelius and where Akelius Technology is today, along with where they’re heading with all the new challenges. A warm welcome to Andreas, CEO of Akelius Technology.
Andreas Wallén: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Erik.

The Birth of Akelius Technology [00:01:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: You had excellent business timing with your portfolio a couple of years ago, and I guess without an IT system that wouldn’t have been possible.
Andreas Wallén: No, that’s correct. Akelius group today consists of the real estate company where we own residential real estate. Since this big disposal, we have created the tech company. We’re a standalone company today, and we are also selling our services externally.
Many years ago, we saw that a lot of the administrative tools in the market are quite old, to be honest. They also integrate quite badly. With our big market footprint across different countries and markets within countries, we had difficulties integrating the different software systems we had. So at some point, we decided to build everything on our own instead. We are in the mindset of “go big or go home,” so we built everything from scratch.

Integration Challenges [00:03:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: Since you were playing monopoly in the sense that you were acquiring lots of buildings and portfolios, they each had their own systems, and you needed to consolidate these things.
Andreas Wallén: Exactly. My experience is that many ERP suppliers are sitting with quite old legacy systems. They say today that they have APIs and can integrate, but when you look closely, it’s a bit for show. It’s not really there, in our opinion.

Building a Modern Platform [00:05:00]

Andreas Wallén: It’s getting better today. This is maybe from some years ago, but we want to be able to exchange data. So we built our own platform to integrate with whatever system is in the market. This way, we can gather data information from various systems, and over time we grow our own applications. Then we have our own data lake or data mart or data warehouse that we use.

Security and Compliance [00:08:00]

Andreas Wallén: There are two paths that are tricky. One is GDPR, which isn’t that new anymore. In the real estate business, the tricky part is tenant information management. We also deal with PCI DSS with payments. We’re certified by ISO 27001, and we can see that we’re under attack all the time. We have a team working on these things. The world is propelling into tech security issues and danger, and we can see that growing year on year.

ESG Reporting Challenges [00:10:00]

Andreas Wallén: Then you have ESG reporting requirements, which is tricky as well. This requires gathering data from utility providers and creating reports. I don’t have a silver bullet for this one because it’s often related to existing hardware and legacy systems in buildings. I think Sweden is quite far ahead because the utility providers are providing APIs and data. Based on our experience in other countries where it’s much more old-fashioned, Sweden has a good chance to be best in breed in these topics.

Success Story and Data Value [00:12:00]

Andreas Wallén: Akelius Technology came out of the real estate company. We were targeted to optimize and drive change and efficiencies within the real estate company. When half of the real estate company was sold – a successful sale of 9.1 billion euros about three years ago – we were asked to extract all the data for the due diligence. We did that within 20 minutes because we had streamlined all the business procedures. The brokers and interested companies were really surprised. We did a desktop exercise to estimate it was around 5 percent of the deal – the clean data we could provide. That’s about half a billion euros.

Future Challenges [00:15:00]

Andreas Wallén: We are ISO certified, and the most important data to protect is the tenant data, related to GDPR. We see a lot of fraudsters trying to get to us. We’re under constant attack and are now hiring another person for the information security team. This is not a desktop exercise – we see real attacks coming in regularly.

Conclusion [00:17:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: Thank you very much, Tomi, for the insights into Proptech, with the foundation of the Empathic Building. I like your vision of having empathic software and making the buildings that surround you empathic. See below for links to contact me or Tomi if you want more information or to contact us. Don’t forget to subscribe to the ProptechOS Best of Breed podcast. Thank you.