Between December 2025 and August 2026, at least ten CFOs changed seats across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North. Read as a set, one feature stands out: every incoming CFO already held the title at another listed company. None was an internal promotion. None was a first-time CFO.
On 5 August 2026, Digia named Kimmo Kärkkäinen its next CFO, recruited from Vincit, itself a listed IT company. We got curious: is it normal for a Finnish listed company to hire its CFO from within the industry, straight out of another public company's finance seat? So we checked our own data, and got the answer.
On its own, the Digia appointment is a routine leadership-moves story, the kind Listeds covers dozens of times a year. But set it beside every other CFO move Listeds has tracked over the past months, and a pattern appears that no single release shows on its own.
Ten CFO hires, and not one was promoted from within
Across the ten moves in the table below, not one incoming CFO was promoted from within their new company, and not one was taking a CFO title for the first time. Every appointee arrived already holding the CFO role at another listed company.
That is the story worth telling. It is a stronger, more defensible claim than the "domino chains" it is tempting to draw from the same data, because, as set out below, chains are partly an artefact of how you connect the dots, whereas the absence of internal promotions is a genuine, countable pattern.
Ten CFOs changed companies between December 2025 and August 2026
This is not a sample. It is every CFO change Listeds tracked across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North in the window, verified against primary company releases.
Incoming CFO | New company | Came from (CFO seat) | Announced | Effective from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Kimmo Kärkkäinen | Digia | Vincit | 5 Aug 2026 | by Feb 2027 |
Pia Aaltonen-Forsell | Valmet | Finnair | 24 Jul 2026 | by end of Jan 2027 |
Jussi Siitonen | Finnair | Fiskars Group | 24 Jul 2026 | 1 Nov 2026 |
Niko Haavisto | Fiskars Group | Nokian Tyres | 24 Jun 2026 | 10 Aug 2026 |
Jukka Kainulainen | Revenio Group | Kempower | 13 May 2026 | 24 Aug 2026 |
Minni Lempinen | KH Group | Endomines | 6 May 2026 | 17 Aug 2026 |
Katri Hokkanen | Kalmar | Valmet | 30 Mar 2026 | 1 Oct 2026 |
Tuomas Mäkipeska | Kemira | YIT | 23 Oct 2025 | 1 April 2026 |
Robin Pulkkinen | F-Secure | Revenio Group | 18 Dec 2025 | by June 2026 |
Saara Ukkonen | Gofore | Witted Megacorp Oyj | 18 Dec 2025 | 1 April 2026 |
Two dating notes, in the interest of precision: Minni Lempinen was acting CFO at Endomines before KH Group; and Tuomas Mäkipeska's move to Kemira was announced in October 2025 and took effect on 1 April 2026. The window is therefore best described as December 2025 to August 2026, not "the first seven months of 2026"; three of the ten were announced in 2025.
The "domino chains" oversell it; the real pattern is what's missing
It is tempting to connect these into cascades, because several of the seats link up. But a note of analytical caution belongs here: every CFO departure creates a vacancy that someone fills, so almost any set of same-role moves can be drawn as a "chain." Tracing a seat backwards through its last three occupants does not prove the moves caused one another. It mostly proves that finance-chief roles, once vacated, get filled.
So the chains below are offered as illustration, not as a discovered structure. They show how tightly the same small pool recirculates, but the load-bearing finding remains the one above: no internal promotions, no first-timers.
Chain 1: Industrial & transport circuit
Niko Haavisto left Nokian Tyres for Fiskars Group; Jussi Siitonen left Fiskars for Finnair; Pia Aaltonen-Forsell left Finnair for Valmet; Katri Hokkanen left Valmet for Kalmar. Each departure vacated the seat the next executive filled. The Finnair-to-Valmet link was confirmed in the companies' own releases; the Valmet-to-Kalmar and Fiskars-to-Finnair links likewise.
Chain 2: Energy & healthtech circuit
Jukka Kainulainen moved from Kempower to Revenio Group; Robin Pulkkinen then moved from Revenio Group to F-Secure.
Chain 3: the Digia hub
Kristiina Simola arrived at Digia from Digitalist Group in 2017; Kimmo Kärkkäinen arrives from Vincit in 2026. Two different companies, feeding the same seat, nine years apart.
The same thing keeps happening in Finnish listed IT
This isn't only a 2026 story, either. Look at one corner of the market, Finnish listed IT, and the same thing keeps happening. The cases below aren't the whole picture, and plenty of IT names are missing from them. They're just a few real, publicly announced appointments, dropped in to show that the same move, hiring a CFO who already holds the job at another listed company, keeps turning up in the sector year after year rather than only last summer:
Incoming CFO | New company | Came from | Effective from |
|---|---|---|---|
Kristiina Simola | Digia | Digitalist Group Plc | 2017 |
Petri Hiljanen | Bittium | Detection Technology Oyj | Apr 2024 |
Mervi Kerkelä-Hiltunen | Teleste | QPR Software Oyj | Oct 2024 |
Familiarity, scarcity and caution could all explain it
None of this can be proved from the move data alone.
The simplest explanation is familiarity with the job's disclosure burden. A sitting Nasdaq Helsinki or First North CFO already knows the IFRS reporting cycle, the AGM calendar and the disclosure rules, so a board and CEO that hires one is buying a shorter learning curve than any outside candidate could offer.
A second explanation is scarcity. Finland's listed universe is small, and the number of executives who have actually run finance inside a public company is smaller still, so boards keep drawing from the same short list.
A third is caution. In a year when several of these companies are cutting costs and defending margins, a proven public-company track record reads as the safer appointment, and the safest appointment is the person already doing the job somewhere else.
Every listed-company CFO is already someone else's candidate
For boards, the takeaway is a little uncomfortable: the pool of finance chiefs in Helsinki is shallow, and it keeps recycling itself. If your CFO walks, the realistic replacement is another listed company's current CFO, which means your own CFO is, by the same logic, already on someone else's shortlist.
For investors, the thing to watch is the open seats. Vincit's vacancy, created by the Digia hire, is still unfilled as of writing, and where its next CFO comes from could carry the pattern on into 2027. And for the market as a whole, the real signal is what isn't happening: almost nobody is being promoted into these jobs from within. That points to thin internal succession for the finance chief across Finnish listed companies, a governance question worth a story of its own.
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