AARO celebrates 30 years in 2019!
Time flies, and it’s amazing how much that has happened since 1989 when AARO, named after the founder Jonas Aaro, was registered as a company.
In 2019, we celebrate 30 years! The future looks bright and we feel confident about continuous growth in Sweden, also in the Nordic region, as well as in additional new markets.
Making our customers’ group reporting faster, easier and more transparent than other products on the market, is our constant strive.
Take part of our 30-year history, in just three minutes:
The 90s
During our first ten years, we were a consulting company that built customer-specific solutions for various customers with consolidation and follow-up.
In the mid-90s, we could deliver systems with extensive operational follow-up and legal consolidated accounts, with the acquisition register in one and the same solution – we were probably among the first in the world doing this.
We started to expand, and towards the end of the 1990s the company consisted of 10 people, with a mix of developers and economists. We now opened our first development office, in Norrbotten, in the north of Sweden.
In 1999, we decided to build a standard product, as we saw that other products on the market were far too complicated, without being able to solve the challenges that customers had regarding their group reporting.
The fact that AARO should be user-friendly and intuitive has been a priority from the start, and we now released the first version of the report generator (drilldown). It became a success, and since then drilldown has continued to be many customers’ favourite AARO function.
“The Nordic region is our home market, where we will continue to grow, in parallel with being open to meet new markets in other countries”
00s
During our first years as a product company, we grew quite slowly with a few new customers per year. We invested a lot in the AARO product, as demands and requests from our new customers came in. Being responsive to our customers’ demands has been the key to our success; that we are good at listening to our customers before we decide on which developmental leaps we are going to bring into the product.
Now we started thinking in terms that group reporting should be a “non-event” and that it should be possible to close the books within 24 hours.
Technically, in the beginning of the 90s, we went from a clean client / server solution to a multi-layer solution, with an application server in Java. We opened our first offices abroad – development offices in Tallinn and Riga. The first groups with headquarters outside Sweden discovered us and chose AARO for their operational and legal group reporting.
During our second decade, we developed a base package (the AARO Base Package) and a method that made the implementation process both simpler and faster than before, and way much faster than other systems on the market.
“Our customers’ group reporting should be faster, easier and more transparent than other groups.”
10s
During the 2010s we grew on several levels. In 2012, 100 groups in the Nordic region had chosen AARO and we had then launched our first web interface. A few years later we had 200 customers and reached the milestone that 25% of the groups at OMX Stockholm Large Cap were AARO users.
We became the market leader in Sweden. More than half of the groups that are looking at a new system for group reporting choose AARO.
In Sweden, many application consultants are now working. As well as in Malmö and Stockholm, we also opened an office in Gothenburg.
In the latter half of the 10s, we are seriously expanding into new markets, primarily in the Nordic region, but also in the Middle East and Africa. We have opened offices in Nairobi and Dubai.
In recent years, we have devoted a lot of time and effort to the development and delivery of AARO Lease IFRS 16, a smooth product for calculating the IFRS 16 effects. It is suitable for companies with everything from a few single contracts, to thousands of contracts.
Over the next 30 years ahead, we will continue to launch more AARO-compliant products, listen to our customers’ wishes, and be Sweden’s No1 producer and supplier of group reporting systems.
“We will continue to deliver the market’s most user-friendly and intuitive system”
