Recap: Women in Tech Sweden x Ziklo Bank

Gothenburg’s Best-Kept Secret

The setting itself was part of the story. Ziklo Bank, which had operated under the name Volvo Finans Bank since 1959, officially changed its name in March 2024. The rebrand was not cosmetic. It marked a deliberate pivot toward becoming what the company calls a mobility bank – one designed to finance and support the transition to sustainable transportation, with electrification as its central focus.

Not too many people in the room had heard of Ziklo Bank before receiving the invitation. Even fewer knew that behind the relatively quiet brand sits an in-house tech department of nearly 200 people – almost half of the bank’s entire workforce. As several speakers noted with a smile throughout the evening: Ziklo Bank is perhaps Gothenburg’s best-kept secret.

That is precisely what the evening set out to change.

Diversity Is a Performance Question, Not a Charity Question

The first highlight of the evening came via a video link from Stockholm, where Joel Graffman, CEO of Ziklo Bank, joined from a screen at the front of the room. Joel had been at the bank for seven years before becoming CEO in April 2024, and he made clear from the outset that diversity and inclusion are not values he treats as abstract obligations.

“For me, the question has always been completely simple and undramatic,” he said. “It becomes better with diversity. It is not some kind of charity question – it is a pure performance question.”

Joel noticed that the best ideas rarely arrive on command, and that different personalities and perspectives – not just different genders, but different ways of thinking – are what produce stronger decisions.
“We are a bank, we are part of society. We cannot have bias or too narrow perspectives. We need broadband,” he said. 

The message landed clearly: building a genuinely diverse organisation is not about optics. It is about building better products, making better decisions, and reflecting the world you operate in.

Building a Brand from 65 Years of History

After Joel’s session, the audience heard from Denise Engström, Head of Marketing, and Anna Hartelius, Head of Brand, who walked through the journey of creating a new brand identity with deep, complex roots.

Today, Ziklo Bank’s marketing is shaped by what the team calls Martech – marketing technology. AI, automation, and data have given the team the ability to understand customer journeys, respond at the right moments, and personalise in ways that weren’t previously possible. Crucially, Denise and Anna argued, this technology acts as an equaliser. It shifts the emphasis toward competence, creativity, and insight, rather than background or seniority.

The name “Ziklo” itself carries meaning. It comes from the Latin for “circle” (with a C), representing cycles and circularity – a fitting identity for a bank focused on sustainable mobility. When the team launched the new brand, it was both a milestone and a beginning: establishing a fresh identity while honouring 65 years of institutional knowledge and trust.

What It Really Means to Build a Tech Team

The evening’s next act focused squarely on the tech department. Isabelle Bergström, Tech Transformation Manager, and Marianne Moberg, Chief Information Officer, took the stage to introduce the inner workings of Ziklo’s technical operations.

The numbers were striking. Of the roughly 200 people in the in-house tech department, 46.6% are women – a figure well above industry benchmarks. The bank has made a deliberate strategic choice to keep its development in-house, building both competence and culture from within. As Isabelle explained, that choice creates something genuinely valuable: people who understand the business logic deeply, who have grown with the systems, and who pass that knowledge on.

But this is not a department resting on its history. The tech stack spans everything from legacy COBOL and RPG code dating back decades to cutting-edge agentic AI being tested in 2025. Marianne, the bank’s longest-serving employee present in the evening, spoke about the joy of continuous development – and made clear that the next frontier she was most excited about was artificial intelligence.

The Breakout Sessions 

The evening continued with the participants splitting into two different focus sessions in separate parts of the office, overlooking the Gothenburg evening skies.

AI in Practice: What Ziklo Is Actually Doing

The breakout session on AI drew a large crowd, and for good reason. Ulrika Wennberg, Head of Project Management and Product Owner Sofia Lindberg from the bank’s AI programme gave the kind of presentation that cuts through hype and lands in the concrete.

Ziklo has structured its AI work as a formal programme, directly overseen by the bank’s leadership group. The message from the top is clear: this is not a side project for the tech team. It is a whole-bank transformation. The programme has a core team, an AI squad that runs ahead to test and build, and a network of 42 ambassadors spread across the organisation – people who help find use cases, pilot tools, and track results within their own teams.

Four focus areas organise the work: AI in everyday working life, internal AI products, customer-facing AI tools, and upskilling across all 400 employees.

Sofia was candid about the challenges. Building with AI in a regulated environment means constant dialogue with legal teams, security functions, and compliance frameworks. The path forward is not always straight. “Sometimes it feels like one step forward and three steps back,” she acknowledged. But discipline is part of what makes the work credible.

The session ended with a telling chart: when it comes to getting real value from AI, changing models or fine-tuning foundation models accounts for perhaps 10% of the effort. Making data accessible in the cloud accounts for around 30%. The remaining 60% – the majority of the work – is change management. Helping people understand the tools, trust them, and embed them into their daily processes.

Zest: The Design System That Unites a Complex Digital Landscape

The other breakout room hosted a presentation that was just as impressive in its own right. Elin Davidsson, Head of Design & User Experience, and Jessica Skårbratt, Developer, introduced the audience to Zest – Ziklo Bank’s in-house design system.

The challenge they had set out to solve was one that many in the room instantly recognised: how do you create consistent, accessible, and effective digital experiences across an organisation with many teams, many products, and many different technical environments? 

What Elin and Jessica presented was the result of a project that had done something genuinely difficult: brought together the design for all of the bank’s products and services under one coherent system, that they successfully demoed to the audience. The Figma diagrams projected on screen – sprawling, intricate maps of components, tokens, and dependencies – illustrated the scale of what they had built. Zest is not just a component library. It is a living infrastructure that connects semantic design, logic, and code, making it possible for teams to work faster, more consistently, and with far greater confidence that a change in design actually flows through correctly into the finished product.

The business case was clear. Zest has strengthened the bank’s brand coherence, significantly reduced duplicated work across teams, and improved collaboration between designers and developers. After the presentation, Elin and Jessica almost didn’t make it to the pizza slides because of all the questions and conversations taking place. 

A Room That Reflected the Work

By the time the formal programme ended and the networking began, the room had a particular energy. People were already exchanging LinkedIn details, clustering around the Ziklo HR team with questions about roles and internships, and continuing conversations that had started mid-presentation.

Elin closed the main programme with a thought that stayed in the air: “Whatever you’re doing today – would the younger version of you be proud?” It was a small question with a large answer, and one that felt entirely at home in a room full of women building careers in tech.