ODIN Forvaltning - aiming for the best

Nordea visits ODIN Forvaltning - a leading Norwegian fund management company - to follow up on the Oslo-based company’s use of Corporate eGateway.

This Nordea solution for handling mass payments has contributed to achieving two important goals for the company: to expand business with a limited number of resources and to increase efficiency through the use of better electronic systems.

15 February 2006 was an exiting date for ODIN Forvaltning. On this day they entered a new era with the start-up of Corporate eGateway. Everyone in the implementation team was excited. Would the start be succesful? By the end of the day, ODIN Forvaltning, TietoEnator (supporting ODIN’s internal systems), and Nordea had managed to process as many as 30,000 payments. A satisfactory Day 1 despite some technical difficulties.

- The process started in mid 2005 when we contacted Nordea to discuss market developments and business possibilities. We are a company always looking for new ways of doing things, so Nordea presented its Corporate eGateway solution to us. We found it very interesting and today, we use Nordea’s EDIFACT platform to a large extent as a one point of entry, both for domestic and cross-border payments, and we are very pleased with the solution. We work closely with Nordea’s Corporate eGateway Support function, which informs us of any problems that might cause payment delays, says Harald Næs, Senior Advisor, ODIN Forvaltning.

Geir Storvik, Senior Adviser at ODIN, adds: - Corporate eGateway supports not only our business foundation, but the whole way we are working. We are much more efficient and spend less time on administration than earlier. The number of daily transactions is vast and growing all the time. Incoming payments alone have passed more than 240,000 transactions per month. Automation of internal processes has increased our capacity and freed valuable resources, which – together with more focus on strategies and business goals – are now used to ‘hunt down’ additional market shares, not only in the Nordic but also in the international fund market.

ODIN Forvaltning is today one of the biggest Corporate eGateway customers in Nordea.

Ready to go further

Based on the experience so far, Corporate eGateway is the logical basis for future development of the company, both technologically and business-wise. Corporate eGateway has been the ’starter’ of a huge process, which will take years and be complex but also interesting. The way ODIN sees the future, the EDIFACT format is one of two supporting ’legs’, with SWIFT being the other important ’leg’.

- We have decided to adopt the SWIFTNet Mail solution because we are expanding our international business and want to resolve problems of using insecure faxes and e-mails. We will also implement the new international UNIFI standard, or ISO 20022 standard, which provides the financial industry with a common platform for the development of messages in a standardised XML syntax. We definitely have a need for Corporate eGateway alongside with SWIFT, because the two standards supplement each other in terms of functionality and in other areas too. I see a lot of new business opportunities in the years to come, which we will discuss closely with Nordea, says Svein Carlsson, director, Technology and Business Development Services, ODIN Forvaltning.

A standardised world

Every step taken by ODIN Forvaltning is based on a long-term strategy outlining exactly what the goals are.

- We want to be part of the future trading place, which will be international and very competitive. As a consequence, we cannot evade the question of standardisation in order to reduce costs and complexity. We are about to enter a much simpler world when talking about money transfers. In this process we will make use of our close cooperation with Nordea to gain the maximum of the coming and very exciting new world of global money transactions, ends Svein Carlsson.

December 2007