A word from our founder, Martin Prantner
The end of the year is a perfect moment to reflect on all our hard work and accomplishments together. 2020 has been a tumultuous year for everyone, full of unexpected events that have substantially altered our way of living and working. I am very proud of how our people have worked to overcome the challenges and continued to succeed in spite of the difficult circumstances – both personally and professionally. I would like to thank all our staff for their extraordinary efforts this year. This situation forced us to really examine our processes and communication. We pulled together as a team and found ways to standardize our methods across the company in all aspects of the business operation including development, customer service, finance, sales, marketing and more.
In spite of the challenges, we have met and even outperformed our goals. We made dramatic improvements in our service and delivery. We implemented new processes and products. We launched exciting new brands and expanded into new markets. We even managed to completely rebrand our company with a refined new identity that better suits our core strengths and values. We learned the importance of process and communication for effective teamwork at a distance. And above all, we prioritized serving our customers with improved efficiency and innovation.
Now as we close the year, we begin looking forward to 2021 and beyond. We have set the company on a path for sustainable and profitable growth, and this has created the perfect opportunity for a change in our management to support this next stage in our corporate development. Finnplay has now selected Sari Aitokallio as its new Managing Director. Ms. Aitokallio is a founding partner in the company and has been active as its Chief Commercial Officer since March 2018. A lawyer by education, Ms. Aitokallio brings decades of executive level experience in international business and finance as a CFO for listed Finnish companies, including a long executive career in Metso, the Finnish industrial machinery company providing technology and services for mining, aggregates, oil and gas, recycling, pulp and paper and other process industries.
I will be stepping aside from my role as CEO and will focus on strategy, new market development and partnerships in my new role as non-executive director and Chairman of the Board for the company.
On behalf of the entire team at Finnplay, please join me in welcoming Sari to her new role. We wish you all a wonderful New Year and we look forward to more excitement and success together in 2021. In early January we will be sharing our development roadmap and strategic objectives, so stay tuned for more!
Best wishes,
Martin
Here’s a quick look back at some of our major accomplishments in 2020:
And here are some reflections from our department heads as they share their team’s highlights from the year.
360 Services Department & DevOps,
Andrey Rezinkin,
VP Operations
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Our main goal is always to provide top quality service to Finnplay customers. In 2020 we have developed a whole new department dedicated to service and support, 360 Services. The result has been an impressive improvement in our level of service time and quality, including:
- The average first response time reduced from 1 day, 10 hours, 19 min in August to 12 minutes in November.
- The average resolution time is changed from 1 week, 1 day, 16 hours in August to 4 days, 3 hours in November.
- The amount of SLA violated tickets dropped from 21 to 3 per month.
Our DevOps team also made significant new developments such as:
- Automated installation of the new stage environment resulting in reducing the set up process from 2 days to 1 hour.
- We improved and standardized the Eagle Eye monitoring tool. It gives us a better understanding of our customers' performance and provides meaningful alarms in case of problems.
We also introduced new tools to better support our customers:
- Finn.chat - chat application available for Finnplay customers to report critical/urgent issues.
- Eagle eye monitoring tool.
- Game and Payment support
- BO training.
Technology
Yang Meng, CTO
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In 2020, we focused on performance improvement of our Titan platform, we tripled the amount of game roundsper second, and improved the overall performance to support thousands of concurrent online players.
Also we have containerized all applications in our platform, which improves the deployment of the platform, and significantly shortens the downtime of deployment. Other notable improvements include:
- Development and implementation of powerful new Engagement Manager tool
- Implemented and improved Responsible Gaming features such as RG alarms, Monthly Spending Limit notification, block Increasing / Removing Deposit Limits, blocking of withdrawal if SoF has been requested and email is not verified
- Improved AML, for example, we now support multiple types of Source of Funds for Annual Income, AML SOF ongoing monitoring, Player Risk Management, player monthly gaming budget
- Integrated ShuftPro to provide automatic KYC
- HAMPI improvements - HAMPI report improvement and ability to block game play per product
- Multi-domain support to the site
- Improved Backoffice API for unsubscribe, user account activation
- New feature in Backoffice to protect user's personal information ("GDPR Enabled")
- Implemented Continuous PEP checks
- Integerated Twilio (SMS provider)
- Implemented Automatic Login from activation email v2
- Implemented Historic data storage to improve the performance of the whole platform
- Introduced application metrics and monitoring, now 80% of our applications are monitorable, and we will continue improving the monitoring to cover all applications.
- Improved Front-end performance
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Games Department
Lily Alenina,
VP Games
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This year was a busy year with plenty of new additions to our ever-growing list of integrated providers. We also worked very hard to enhance our communication with the operators through our newsletter and notifications. In addition to this we developed new features such as,
- A bonus abuse protection system connected to the game play
- Dynamic icons for the games - every game icon can be animated now to create a special player experience!
- Integrating and enhancing our promotion tools for up to 10 game providers
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Payment Department
Jenni Chen,
Payments Manager
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It been a very busy year supporting all our integrated payment partners, our operators and making sure all the payment transactions worked seamlessly. Some highlights from our department in 2020 included:
- Improved efficiency with organizational restructuring. We divided the team into two functional support unit- Payment support and Payment product development.
- Centralization by setting up our payment service hub in Tallinn, Estonia.
- Improved integration of payment providers, including OpenPay, Vanilla Pay, APCO
- PaymentIQ - integrated multipe payment methods, for example Interac, Neosurf..., and also integrated PaymentIQ's Cashier page
- OPay Banklink - new payment provider
- PaymentsPlus - new payment provider
- Integrated new Neteller API from Paysafe Payments API to comply with The Second Payment Services Directive (“PSD2”)
- Enhanced Payment Notification Handling for security
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Quality Assurance
Selina Guo,
VP Quality Assurance
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- One of most important developments this year has been the enhancement of automation coverage in the platform including up to:
- 68% (529 out of 775) in total for Platform
- 64% (55 out of 86) for platform payments
- 40% (14 out of 35) for platform games with bets
- 80% (78 out of 98) for platform API
- We enabled loading all games with automation on production on 4 of our sites.
- Applied automation script to stage sites, 86% (24 out of 28) sites covered
- Performance script for Back Office page loading monitoring
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Delivery
Jaakko Soininen,
VP Deliveries
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Although I’m still quite new with the Finnplay team, the pace of development since I joined in August has been impressive.
- We have been able to reduce the average downtime during releases quite a lot from 2 hours in February to 37 mins Nov/Dec.
- We built a completely new structure for our Account Management and Team Leadership to streamline our responsibilities, and provide focused, more dedicated resources to our customers as well as improve our overall performance.
- Improved time-to-market. We succeeded in getting Princess Casino live in just 8 weeks from the start of the project.
- We onboarded new internal tools for communication and documentation to improve our efficiency and support our future scalability.
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Sales and Marketing
Erkki Nikunen,
CMO
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This has been a transitional year for Finnplay as we evolved our strategy towards focusing primarily on our platform business, and also working with larger and more established partners. The year began with a complete rebranding of our company and our products – which better defined our identity and our strengths to ourselves and to the market. We achieved our goals and developed the right path for the company moving forward into 2021. Some of our accomplishments include:
- Our best year in sales and signing large customers
- New market entries in Lithuania and Spain
- Participating as an expert in numerous industry panel discussions
- Being nominated for several prestigious industry awards (which we aim to win next year!)
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