10 Years of AFA: The Origins of Aalto Finance Alumni
Valtteri Kuusisto
Aalto Finance Alumni was established in 2016, when the relationship between finance students and alumni began to be developed in a more systematic way. The need had been identified several years earlier, but the development of alumni activities had repeatedly been postponed to the next board.
At the time, Jesper Kontinen was chairman of KY Finance. Together with Vice-Chairman Hermanni Vanha-Jaakkola, he decided to take action. They reviewed notes from previous boards, in which the establishment of an alumni association had been discussed for five or six years. “It was always just pushed forward,” Kontinen recalls.
According to the founders, the idea was clear: there was significant untapped potential in the connection between students and alumni, but without a permanent structure, the iniative would depend on a small number of motivated individuals. The purpose of AFA was to create a community that would survive changes in boards and student cohorts.
A small core team, a clear need
The first people invited to join were identified through the history of finance studies and among former chairpersons. In addition to students, the group included alumni with experience in finance and connections to the broader finance community. Jaakko Eteläaho was among the first people contacted and contributed through his extensive network and contacts. Kontinen was responsible for advancing the initiative in practice, while Vanha-Jaakkola also played an active role.
“Jesper was the driving force who kept pushing the project forward”
According to the founders, alumni activities had received too little attention within the university. Communication consisted of individual emails or occasional invitations to become mentors, but there was no systematic alumni network. “Alumni activities were handled poorly. There was practically nothing,” Eteläaho says.
The goal was not merely to fix existing shortcomings. The founders saw alumni as an important resource for the university and the finance community. They compared Aalto’s activities with alumni models at universities such as Harvard and Copenhagen, where alumni networks are a central part of the university’s identity.
Registration made the idea real
One of the most important decisions was to establish AFA as an official association. The founders wanted to ensure that the idea would not once again remain a discussion or become a project limited to a single board. The founding documents were prepared in a classroom.
AFA received a high-profile launch at a kick-off event held at Restaurant Teatteri on 29 April. More than one hundred attendees gathered to mark the beginning of the new alumni community. In addition to Kontinen and Eteläaho, the programme featured remarks from Ingmar Björkman, Dean of the School of Business, and Sami Torstila, Head of the Department of Finance.
The event generated considerable interest and was followed by an outpouring of positive feedback from alumni. As Eteläaho recalls, the response made clear that the finance community had long been looking for more meaningful content and a more active alumni network of its own.
The kick-off was important because it demonstrated that there was genuine demand for the initiative. The founders also recognized that the event involved some risk: if it had failed, building a new community might have become considerably more difficult. When the event succeeded, AFA’s future began to feel more concrete. “When it went well, I got the feeling that something could really come out of this,” Kontinen says.
The Quarterly connected the community
From the beginning, AFA was about more than organizing events. The founders wanted to create a regular communication channel that would keep alumni informed about events and developments within the finance community. This need led to the creation of AFA Quarterly. Its purpose was to announce upcoming events, report on previous ones and strengthen the relationship between alumni, students and the faculty.
Eteläaho considers the Quarterly one of AFA’s most important early decisions. “We keep alumni informed about what is happening at the school and within the student community,” he says. The Quarterly also had a broader community-building function. A regular publication reminded alumni that they remained part of the finance community. Kontinen explains that the publication was produced for its first years largely according to the same visual concept that had been established at the beginning, and with the logo designed by Kontinen himself, remains in use today.
Content and community
The events organized during AFA’s first years combined professional content with informal interaction. The programme included lectures on macroeconomics, an event focused on neural networks, golf, football matches and an Alumni Book launch event at the Töölö campus.
The events were not intended to be purely social, but neither did they have to consist solely of formal seminars. “We tried to make sure that the events had some substantive content,” Kontinen says. The topics were intended to connect in some way to the finance community. At the same time, the events created opportunities for informal discussion and networking.
Mentoring brought alumni closer to students
In 2017, AFA and KY Finance launched a joint mentoring programme. More than 20 mentor–mentee pairs participated in the initial pilot. The programme was partly a response to the experience that the university’s own mentoring model did not always connect students with alumni who were relevant to their interests or career goals. The AFA and KY Finance programme aimed to create more practical and suitable relationships.
“You might be assigned someone whose professional relevance to you was zero,” Kontinen says when describing the earlier model. The new programme received positive feedback and continued after the pilot. It reflected AFA’s broader objective: alumni were not merely representatives of the past, but people whose experience could be passed on to the next generation of students. The programme’s continued operation is a testament to the value it has created for both students and alumni.
Finding direction after the initial momentum
AFA had a strong start, but during its first years the founders also had to reconsider the association’s direction. Not every event attracted the same level of interest, and the participants were often the same active alumni. “At first things moved very quickly, and then we struggled a bit with what our role actually was,” Kontinen says.
The main challenge was engaging alumni. Many might follow AFA’s communications, but attending an event required a separate decision and a commitment of time. According to Eteläaho, the participation threshold would be lower if alumni had better information about who else would attend the events.
“If you knew that many other alumni would be there, the relevance of attending would increase dramatically.” The founders believe that this challenge still exists to some extent. AFA has significant potential, but encouraging alumni to participate actively requires continuous development.
Continuity turned AFA into an institution
From the founders’ perspective, the most important early decisions were formally establishing the association, building a sufficiently broad base of support and launching regular communication. Eteläaho places particular emphasis on the importance of the Quarterly. For Kontinen, the decisive factor was that the kick-off event in the first spring attracted a large audience and succeeded. These decisions ensured that AFA did not remain a one-board experiment. The activities were passed on to future boards and student cohorts, gradually becoming a permanent part of the finance community.
Looking back, the founders primarily remember the transformation from an uncertain starting point into the established community that exists today. Eteläaho says he is proud that the initially uncertain project grew into a permanent part of the community built around Aalto Finance.
For Kontinen, the most important memory from the early years is the positive reception from alumni. “Everything was extremely positive,” he says. “There was demand. The only question was who would do it.”
Valtteri Kuusisto is the Editor-in-Chief of AFA Quarterly