We are Nordnet

Who are we?

Nordnet

Nordnet is a pan-Nordic platform for savings and investment — and the only one operating at scale in all four Nordic markets: Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

The company was founded in 1996 with a particular mission in mind: Democratize savings and investments. We want to give retail investors access to the same information, tools and markets which institutional and professional investors have always had.

We are about 800 employees at the the time of writing this, with the majority stationed at our headquarters in Stockholm. All Nordic functions such as tech, product and administration are located here, as well as customer service and sales for the Swedish market. Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen have local offices with customer service, sales and marketing.

Nordnet Tech

As you can probably guess, Tech is a cornerstone for a digital platform. Standing about 240 people strong at this point, Tech is an umbrella term covering Engineering, Data & Insights, Security, IT Operations and our Project Management Office.

We believe in autonomous teams, staffed for purpose, solving interesting and challenging problems together. We believe in taking small steps, using data to drive decisions and giving and taking ownership of what you build.

Nordnet was born digital and we are a technology company more than anything else. Our success rests on our ability to be innovative, and continue to push the border for what you can expect from a modern savings platform. We set ourselves up for success, both today and in the future, by building a technology department with highly aligned and autonomous teams, staffed with creative, skilled and empowered people, supported by a modern technology platform and tools. Together we build a truly amazing platform for savings and investments.

Why do we want to have a blog?

While the exhaustive list of reasons is long, we want to highlight three of them:

Knowledge sharing

We have all learned a lot during our journey so far, both good and bad, and we want to share those learnings with the community. A lot of the things we have tried have been learned through reading about other people, teams and companies doing similar (or totally different) journeys and perhaps our stories can be useful to someone else out there. Writing about the great stuff we do as well as the challenges we have faced, and will face, is one way of giving back to the community.

Personal Growth

Knowing how to do something is one thing, teaching it to someone else is a whole different ball game. We believe distilling the core of that knowledge and simplifying it enough to be able to write about or teach it to someone else is a great way of growing our people. It forces you to learn how to find the main message, communicate efficiently and explain things in different ways. Win-win for both us as a company and our people.

Branding and recruitment

We also believe this can be a fantastic tool for branding and recruitment. We do a lot of interesting and technically challenging work — to do that we need to have great people working with us. What better way could there be to show you what working with us could look like, than sharing stories of our wins, less successful experiments, thoughts and learnings? Apart from referrals and word of mouth — we can’t think of many. And who knows, perhaps you think we are wrong and you want to show us a better way of doing the things we want to achieve? Great! Come tell us. We are eager to learn, adapt and grow with you.

What can you expect from us?

We are, as so many others, on a cloud transition journey. Like most, we also long for the reduced infrastructure lead time, on demand access to powerful services, scalability, delivery quality and amazing developer experience. In the upcoming articles, we will share more about these choices. Why we do not lift and shift, the mistakes we aim to avoid, our architecture of choice (DOMA — Domain Oriented Microservice Architecture) and our takes on security are topics you might expect along the way.

Topics in the pipeline

• 24 Months of mob programming
• Our first steps towards Data Mesh on Google Cloud Platform
• Continuous Deployment of Infrastructure as Code
• Mastering Alerts in Cloud Applications
• Coding for rapid releases, don’t forget the basics

Topics we have started thinking about

• Our journey of moving to cloud and our architectural choices
• Our ways of working together, agile, hybrid mode, pair and mob programming
• Our tools to develop, deploy and maintain our products
• Our culture and beliefs
• Our recruitment
• Our way of sharing and evolving best practises, circles/Communities of practise

Any of these strike your fancy, or are there other topics that you would like to hear from us? Please tell us!

By: Lena Wiberg and Li Xing