Italian IT business consultancy Fincons Group has strengthened its foothold in Germany through a local office in Munich, enabling the company to extend its range of services for local players and reach out to new customers.
In an exclusive interview with Broadband TV News, Michele Moretti, CEO of Fincons Group, and Francesco Moretti, deputy CEO of Fincons Group and CEO of Fincons.US, explain the reasons for the move and the company’s future plans.
Why did you decide to open a German office?
Michele Moretti: We are always committed to helping our clients achieve growth and we decided a while back that to do so we also needed to continue investing in our own international expansion. In addition to our locations in Italy and Switzerland we have opened offices in London, Los Angeles and New York. We now felt the time was right to further expand in Europe and open an office in Germany in Munich. Here, we initially plan to focus on the German media and financial sectors, where we are already breaking significant ground across Europe.
Where is it located and who is heading it? How many people work there?
Francesco Moretti: The new German office is located in the heart of Munich and will be run by leading media consultant Dieter Ruther. With his deep media industry expertise and international background, Dieter is managing director of Fincons.DE. His mandate is to export the group’s ethics and commitment to client objectives and develop further expansion of the company into DACH markets.
Dieter has plenty of important references in the DACH market to build on starting from the railway sector, where we can showcase our work with Swiss SBB. Specifically, Fincons presented TUSP, an innovative solution improving the safety of railway workers initially developed for SBB and now available to the wider market at the latest Innotrans trade fair in Berlin.
What are the main tasks of the German office?
Michele Moretti: The opening of the office comes after several years of us already operating in the German market particularly with leading companies in the media and publishing sectors. Moreover, we have invested our efforts in forming strategic partnerships with leading vendors in other sectors including the transportation, banking and insurance industries. Our aim is to grow our presence and expand our business in these different DACH markets out of Munich and we will be attending more key trade shows such as the Berlin Publishing Days and the Medientage where we hope to meet new partners and prospects.
Which are your main customers in Germany?
Michele Moretti: We believe that our financial services experience and consolidated partnerships with high-level international vendors, including major names in the Swiss territory working on, for example, client-onboarding processes or core banking software, along with our work for household names such as Swiss Re, help show the high-level calibre that we operate with and will make us stand out to other German bankers and insurers. Not to mention our already extensive experience in the German media and publishing industry with tier-1 clients such as Sky Deutschland and BurdaForward.
In particular Sky Deutschland, like Sky Italia and Sky UK, has been Fincons’ client for over 10 years – and has helped us understand and become established in the German media industry. In this sector, Fincons has recently started to work with BurdaForward, an important German publishing house, that relied on Fincons as a facilitator to help establish its first new Italian product and development location in the Italian port city of Bari and used the group’s delivery centre as an incubator for the first steps of the process.
We are also aiming to export our extensive experience in the media and broadcast sector and more specifically in OTT platform design and integration, as exemplified by our work with Mediaset, to Germany where HbbTV has historically made pioneering moves.
How many local offices do you currently operate and where are they located?
Francesco Moretti: Fincons Group currently operates 13 local offices worldwide: five in Italy (Vimercate, Verona, Rome, Bari and Catania), four in Switzerland (Küssnacht am Rigi, Bern, Zurich and Lugano), two in the USA (Los Angeles and New York) as well as one in London and one in Munich.
