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Satu Uski, Alisa Bank’s compliance officer since January 2025, has been promoted to chief information officer, effective June 1, 2026, as the Helsinki-listed digital bank completes a year-long reconstruction of its leadership team and sharpens its focus on scalable SME banking and regulatory-heavy growth areas.
The appointment, still subject to FIN-FSA approval, places a compliance and financial crime specialist at the center of the bank’s technology strategy at a time when Alisa is repositioning around Banking-as-a-Service, SME financing, and tighter operational discipline.
Uski succeeds Tomi Pulkkinen, who will remain at the company as head of IT, preserving technical continuity while shifting management emphasis toward the intersection of technology, compliance, and business execution.
“Scalability of our services and technology-driven development play a key role in our strategy,” Acting CEO Aki Gynther said in the company’s announcement today, also linking the move to the recent appointment of Marko Ahola as chief risk and compliance officer. Together, the changes mark another major step in Alisa Bank’s unusually broad management reset over the past 12 months.
A CIO shaped by regulation and digital banking
The promotion changes the balance of power inside the organization. Uski is not a traditional infrastructure CIO. Her background sits at the increasingly strategic layer between banking technology and regulatory control: Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) frameworks, fraud prevention, identity verification, and digital customer lifecycle management.
Before joining Alisa Bank, she spent five years at Tieto in senior financial services business development and compliance roles focused on financial crime prevention and regulated digital banking processes. Earlier in her career, she led Tieto’s eBanking unit with profit-and-loss responsibility across four countries and held transformation roles at Aktia.
That profile matters because Alisa’s future growth depends less on adding lending volume and more on building a scalable, compliant digital banking infrastructure that can support SME lending and embedded banking partnerships.
A strategy built around embedded banking
The management rebuild makes most sense against Alisa Bank’s full-year 2025 results and published strategy. Operating income came in at EUR 14.9 million, while the loss before taxes reached EUR -2.1 million. At the same time, the bank’s capital adequacy ratio surged to 34.6% from 17.6%, largely because Alisa sold a significant portion of its consumer loan portfolio for EUR 51 million in December 2025. The bank described the transaction not as a distress move, but as “part of a refocusing of its business and efforts to improve profitability.”
That repositioning has clarified the bank’s strategic direction. Invoice financing has emerged as the primary growth product, while Banking-as-a-Service partnerships are becoming the core distribution model. During 2025, Alisa added partnerships with Nordea, Administer, Fennoa, and Netvisor, deepening its embedded banking ambitions. The board has also set explicit medium-term financial targets for the 2024–2027 strategy period: return on equity above 15%, annual income growth of around 20%, and a cost-to-income ratio below 50% by the end of 2027, compared with 92% at the end of 2025. That gap is what the rebuilt management team has been assembled to close.
Uski’s CIO appointment fits directly into this framework. In a Banking-as-a-Service-led bank, scalable technology, compliant digital customer journeys, and KYC/AML infrastructure are not support functions. They are part of the product itself.
That shift helps explain why the bank has rebuilt nearly every major operating function in sequence. Since mid-2025, Alisa has replaced or restructured leadership across funding, risk, business banking, and executive management. The CRCO role elevated compliance to the management team level. Uski’s promotion now extends that same logic into technology leadership. The rebuild reflects a bank focused less on growth at any cost and more on scalable, tightly governed expansion.
Execution becomes the next test
The internal impact may be equally important. By moving Pulkkinen into a specialized head of IT role rather than losing him outright, the bank avoids the disruption that often accompanies a technology leadership change during transformation periods. At the same time, Uski’s appointment gives the management team a stronger operational bridge between compliance, product development, and customer onboarding. In practice, that likely means technology priorities become more closely tied to automation, regulatory resilience, and scalable onboarding capabilities rather than standalone infrastructure modernization.
The bank’s own 2026 outlook anticipates a loss-making first half, with profitability before non-recurring items and taxes expected to turn positive in the second half. A similar back-half profitability target had also been set for 2025 but was not achieved, making the H1 2026 interim results the first real scorecard for the rebuilt leadership team.
Beyond the numbers, the unresolved CEO situation remains one of the most important structural questions around the company. Former CEO Sampsa Laine signed the 2025 Annual Report in February 2026 but had already departed by the time it was published. Acting CEO Aki Gynther’s tenure has now stretched across the consumer portfolio exit, the management overhaul, and multiple senior appointments. Whether the board eventually removes the “acting” designation may say more about Alisa Bank’s long-term direction than any single executive hire.
Alisa Bank enters 2026 leaner, more focused, and with a management team built almost from scratch around its revised strategy. The targets are public. The organizational architecture is now largely in place. What remains is execution, and Satu Uski, elevated from compliance into the CIO role, is central to that effort.
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