Swedbank wanted to minimize manual work

Swedbank is one of the largest banks in the Nordics, with operations in Sweden, the Baltics and several other markets. The bank has around 14,000 employees and adopted its current name in 2006. The group structure spans many entities, systems and regulatory frameworks, placing high demands on an efficient and quality-assured closing process.

Swedbank's finance function handles very large volumes of data from general ledgers and source systems. Before Exopen, much of this work was done manually – extractions, processing and reconciliations – which created bottlenecks in a process with strict deadlines.

The manual workload also made finance vulnerable to key-person dependencies, and the risk of errors grew with every step that had to be done by hand.

"When the books have to close on time, there is no room for manual copy-and-paste."

Swedbank has been using Exopen for twelve years. The solution is built around recurring "queries" that pull data directly from general ledgers and source systems and deliver ready-made datasets to the finance team.

"The person running the reports doesn't need deep expertise in the tool – everything is prepared in advance."

Because the queries are pre-configured, employees who aren't Exopen experts can pull the data they need themselves. That removes the bottleneck where everything had to go through a few key individuals, and makes the process scalable across the whole finance function.

The result is a closing flow with fewer manual steps, faster delivery and higher quality in the underlying data.

"We have built a process that the finance team owns – not a tool that is owned by a handful of specialists."

With Exopen, Swedbank has reached a new level of control and efficiency in the closing process:

• Days cut from the monthly close
• Measurable gains in time, money and organisation
• Less key-person dependency – more people can run the process
• Fewer manual steps and therefore lower risk of errors
• A scalable solution that has kept up over twelve years

"We can estimate the gain in time, money and organisation."

Looking ahead: Onboarding of new employees today happens largely colleague-to-colleague. To raise the knowledge level further and secure long-term quality, Swedbank is planning to make greater use of Exopen's courses and consulting support.

"It would be hard to imagine the closing work without Exopen."