Introduction [00:00:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: Welcome to the 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. And I mean, the kind of voyage you could almost say that Andreas has been with Akelius and where Akelius Technology is today and where they’re heading with all the new challenges. Warm welcome.

Andreas Wallén, CEO of Akelius Technology: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Erik.

Company Origins [00:01:30]

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 is a group of companies today consisting of the real estate company where we own residential real estate. And since this big disposal, we have created the tech company. So we’re a standalone company today, and we are also selling our services externally.

Technology Development Strategy [00:02:00]

Andreas Wallén: We saw many years ago that a lot of the administrative tools in the market are quite old, to be honest, that’s our view. And they also integrate quite badly. With the big market fit that we have with a lot of different countries and markets within the countries, we had difficulties integrating the different bought software that we had.

So at some point, we decided to build everything on our own instead. We are a bit in the mindset of go big or go home. So we did build everything from scratch, basically.

Integration Challenges [00:03:00]

Dr. Erik Wallin: Since you were kind of playing monopoly in the sense that you were acquiring lots of buildings and portfolios and then, of course, they had whatever system they had in that part and then you need to consolidate these things.

Andreas Wallén: Exactly. And my experience is that many of these ERP suppliers – it’s an old abbreviation maybe – but they are sitting with quite old legacy systems and they are today saying that they have APIs and they can integrate and so on. But when you look closely it’s a bit for show. It’s not really there, in our opinion.

Platform Development [00:04:00]

Andreas Wallén: It’s getting better today. This is maybe some of these things happened some years ago, but this is, of course, one thing that we want to be able to exchange data. So we built our own platform to integrate to whatever system is there in the market.

And this way we can gather data information from various systems and over time we grow our own applications and then we have our own, let’s say, data lake or data mart or data warehouse that we use.

Administrative Focus [00:05:00]

Andreas Wallén: For clarity, we are working mainly on the administrative side, let’s say the ERP side and managing tenants, managing the employees and digitizing the procedures inside the company. And also with the tenants, whereas we did take a look at smart building features and so on.

Regulatory Challenges [00:07:00]

Andreas Wallén: I think there are two paths that are a bit tricky. One path is the GDPR – it’s now not that new anymore. But in the real estate business, my experience at least is that the tricky part is the tenant information. So there you need to be careful how to manage tenant information and since we are administrating tenants, it’s kind of tricky.

We touched upon PCI DSS with the payments as well. At the end, we are certified by ISO 27001, and we can also see that we’re under attack all the time. So we have a team working on these things.

ESG Reporting [00:08:00]

Andreas Wallén: Then you have the other part, which is ESG. You have the evolving requirements on ESG reporting, and this is tricky as well. This is something that requires gathering data from utility providers and creating reports. I don’t have a silver bullet for this one.

This is tricky because it’s often related to existing hardware and legacy systems in the buildings. I think actually Sweden is quite far ahead because the utility providers are providing APIs and data on these numbers.

Business Success [00:14:00]

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. Then at some point it was decided that more or less, half of the real estate company was sold. This was a very successful sale.

It was 9.1 billion euros, like three years ago or something similar. And at that point, we were also asked to extract all the data for the data room, for the due diligence. We did that within 20 minutes, because we had streamlined all the business procedures within the company. The brokers and companies interested in the portfolios were really surprised.

And some of the stakeholders there said that this was really valuable. We did a desktop exercise to estimate it was around about 5 percent of the deal – the clean data that we could provide. That’s a big number, it’s half a billion euros. So this is something that we’re proud of.

Security Concerns [00:18:00]

Andreas Wallén: We are ISO certified and the most important data to protect on our end is the tenant data, related to GDPR and so on. But also we see a lot of fraudsters out there who try to get to us. So I would say we’re under constant attack and we actually are now hiring yet another one to the team for information security.

This is not a desktop exercise. We see real attacks coming in every once in a while.

Conclusion [00:18:30]

Dr. Erik Wallin: I don’t know if there’s anything else you would like to add Andreas, but otherwise I think this has been an extremely interesting discussion and understanding the secrets of the Akelius Technology group.

Andreas Wallén: There are no secrets. We’re open for questions. Discussing anything. So that’s a bit of our culture as well. And thank you, Erik, for having me. It was a great pleasure for me.