As we are not stuck on round numbers, this year we celebrate 16 years of Allevo. We invited our customers, our partners and our team members, in a word, our friends, to join us in these moments of rejoicing.

And we invite you now to join us for a few moments down on memory lane. Allevo started with a handful of intrepid IT specialists, armed with courage, patience and determination taking a road that will be neither short nor obstacle free. United by curiosity, interest in what’s new and innovative, they had the desire to bring something fresh and positive in the financial-banking industry.

In a man’s life, 16 years may not mean that much. But in the business world and, perhaps especially in the IT sector, 16 years of hard work meant for Allevo enough time to become a recognizable brand among specialists in Romania and abroad.

If we were to remember just some of the key moments in Allevo’s life, I would definitely think of:

• 1998 – Allevo is born with the goal to make a difference on the local financial market. At that time, we were called Business Informations Systems, a name we used for 13 years
• 1999 – we conclude business alliances with prestigious providers: IBM, SWIFT, Microsoft, Oracle, Infosys, Vision Solutions, Brokat and we become IBM Solution Provider and Microsoft Certified Solution Provider
• 2000 – we start the ISO 9001:2000 certification process and design FMA, a solution providing the real-time resilience of SWIFTAlliance servers
• 2001 – we launch FMA and qBC (a message routing middleware, qPayIntegrator’s precursor)
• 2002 – we obtain the ISO9001 certification under the marks of TGA, UKAS and RENAR and become IBM Premier Software Business Partner
• 2003 – Allevo achieves SWIFT Service Partner level, starts to provide SWIFT services in Central and Eastern Europe and designs qPayIntegrator (payment hub), initially used to connect banks and financial institutions to the national payments infrastructure. Not to mention it gains me as a member of the team 🙂
• 2004 – a very good year! We implement qPayIntegrator in 6 Romanian financial institutions to connect them to the national electronic payment system – REGIS, SENT and SaFIR (corresponding to RTGS, ACH and GSRS), design the AML filtering feature of qPayIntegrator, gain 14 new customers and we organize the first edition of Allevo’s user group
• 2005 – we launch ReconS, a real-time Nostro/Vostro accounts reconciliation solution, providing also a tool for exception management & investigation and become Oracle and MQ Software partners
• 2006 – we launch the liquidity feature of qPayIntegrator and provide services & assistance for SWIFTNet migration phase 2
• 2007 – Allevo launches both the Debit Instruments feature of qPayIntegrator and FMA v2; we also receive the FinMedia e-Impact Award for corporate-to-bank solutions – MACUG
• 2008 – qPayIntegrator becomes the first solution certified SWIFTReady SEPA and we become a first time exhibitor at Sibos, in Vienna
• 2009 – we design the Remit feature of qPayIntegrator, a cost effective payment solutions for remittances management, we achieve CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Level2, receive the FinMedia e-Support Award for qPayIntegrator, a SWIFTReady SEPA solution, continue exhibiting at Sibos, in Hong Kong and start exhibiting at EBAday, in Vienna
• 2010 –  we launch qPayIntegrator version destined for a micro-financing institution (Dutch customer) and the qPI AML transactions filtering feature; the year we exhibit at Sibos Amsterdam and EBAday Luxembourg
• 2011 – is the year of Allevo official launch, after BIS’ rebranding process, started the year before was completed. This year, we also obtained the SWIFTReady Remit 2011 certification for qPI-Remit and receive the e-Service Award FinMedia for the same solution. We launche qPayIntegrator-T2 (TARGET2 connectivity), designe and implemente qPayIntegrator-TIPc (for corporates) and continue the exhibitor tradition at Sibos Toronto and EBADay Madrid
• 2012 – we receive the e-10 years FinMedia Award for excellence and global performances over the last decade (kind of the Oscar for lifetime achievements), we exhibit at Sibos Osaka and EBAday Edinburgh. But the most important, we launch FinTP and FINkers United, the open source project and the community around it that emerged as the result of more than 2 years of rethinking the Allevo business model
• 2013 – we organize the first two FinTP hackathons and take our new concept to Sibos Dubai and EBAday Berlin
• 2014 – we launch the FinTP code and more than that we sign the first FinTP customer. And as usual, we exhibit at Sibos Boston and EBAday Helsinki. And the year is not yet over.

We always believed that transparent sharing of information is crucial, while transparency in itself is a good and necessary guarantee to improve projects and refine ideas. In the IT industry, creative collaboration is almost synonymous with open source, and that led us to a further step, to publish in the open source space our application for processing financial transactions, what you already know now as FinTP.

After looking back at the past 16 years (of course I mentioned only the good moments), I need to take you back to the future. And the future of our activity has BOOST stamped on its forehead. Based on these three pillars – the FinTP open source project, the FINkers United community and the process of reinventing Allevo by aligning its business model to fit open source work –  BOOST (Banking On Open Source Technology) is Allevo’s invitation to be part of a community that proposes, through open and sharing information, developing affordable solutions for the processing of financial transactions. With BOOST, Allevo wants to create a vehicle to increase financial interoperability between industries and geographical areas, and in the same time to empower small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to compete in this environment, in Europe and beyond. You can imagine BOOST as a small step for open source that can become a big step for the financial market.

We only hope that our new initiative will bring us even more satisfaction moments in the next 16 year. And not just for us, but for the financial market and its players as well.

I cannot conclude without thanking everyone who has been a part of Allevo’s 16 years of existence and who supported us, nor without inviting all of you to take this new journey by our side and BOOST the financial market together.