Esa Mäkeläinen Email & Phone Number

Before founding my own company (www.valuatum.com) I have worked in investment banking (equity analysis, sell-side (Nordea)), in credit-risk (corporate banking), in industrial company (Rettig/Marli) and in consulting.Valuatum focuses on AI-based company credit rating software that are more than 50% more accurate to predict bankruptcies and defaults than traditional (normally log.regression based) methods used widely by credit rating agencies and banks. Our solutions is based on XGBoost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_boosting) which is also widely recognized (in academia and with empirical evidence) clearly more accurate measure of corporate credit risk as widely used logistic regression or other traditional measures. The main obstacle before wider user of these AI-tools in corporate credit analysis has been that they are often black boxes: bank managers can not see where the rating comes as they are used with traditional rating methods. However, Valuatum has developed unique way of tackling this with both graphical illustrations of company's financial position as well as written detailled automatic description (also with the help of ChatGPT like AI-tools) of reasons why each company gets the rating like it does. We sincerely think that this kind of immediate and very accurate credit rating tools become widely used with banks and other financial institutions that lend capital to SME-companies, since they are more accurate, faster and thus also more cost-efficient ways to assess credit risk. And we also think that Valuatum has very good position in this transition. More info: http://www.valuatum.com/solutions/credit-risk-solutionsValuatum was originally founded on the idea of avoiding overlapping work with financial analysis: first we offered a platform where e.g. institutional investors can benefit from the ready-made and updated equity valuation models that the sell-side research has produced. Lately our focus has shifted to credit risk analysis but we still serve also equity research industry.Valuatum puts own money where our mouth is and that means that besides our software product business we act also as small institutional investor. We have invested in listed stocks, private bond issues and directly to unlisted companies as an angel investor. Specialties: Artificial Intelligence and use of AI in financial analysis and credit rating (Gradient Boosting), Equity research, Independent research, Equity valuation, fundamental analysis, financial analysis models, company valuation, Investor relations, credit rating and credit research

Listed skills include Equity Research, Financial Modeling, Equity Valuation, Investment Banking, and 40 others.