Summer of Innovation 2017 offers solutions to customer challenges

Nordea’s Summer of Innovation program has recently completed in Stockholm and Helsinki, successfully testing ten prototyped solutions during a period of six weeks. Hosted by the Nordea Innovation team, the program brings together ten talented students from diverse academic backgrounds to work on a collection of different challenges within transaction banking.

This year the program received real-life case challenges from customers including If, Finnair, Wrapp, Nacka Kommun and Ticketmaster. Each week the Summer of Innovation teams were tasked with researching, designing, and testing innovative solutions to existing customer challenges using Google’s one-week prototyping methodology. 

“We are very thankful for the positive emphasis and great interest the program has received, both from customers and internal stakeholders. We are happy that we have been able to incorporate the adoption of agile working methodologies, while at the same time provide empirical value to our customers”, says Jessica Soleiman, Project Manager, Business Innovation.

The rapid prototyping methodology and high customer involvement yielded new and exciting ideas for the case companies to continue developing. This year the cases focused on topics including open banking, customer transparency, merchant on-boarding automation and cash handling optimization. 

“We deepened our relationships with key customers and got to explore completely new industries and domains” says Heikki Härkönen, Head of Business Development. “The teams set the bar high, so our challenge is how to enhance this in 2018.” 

To learn more about the program and hear customers’ testimonials, watch the video below: