Developments at AFA during 2025
Markus Mäkelä
The year 2025 was very eventful for managing AFA, since there were a number of things happening behind the normal scenes, the latter being composed of events, AFA Quarterly, and mentoring.
For me personally, it was a satisfying end to my efforts as president, with a very good team in the board as which we continued developing AFA from where it was after 2024’s work. For example, I am excited and very happy that Toni Mikkonen, an early member of AFA’s board in the 2010s, has joined us as the new president.
At this juncture, I find I have several interesting developments to share or recap!
The member survey and AFA’s continuing development
On a proposal of my successor Toni, with Vice President Jesse Hirvelä we ran a member survey in December. While we received, frankly, solidly heartening feedback from a pretty large proportion of the commentators, we also received valuable ideas for development, the primary goal. Key results:
AFA Quarterly received very good feedback – in some cases even for “excellent” or “very high” quality. Its editors-in-chief Juha Kivistö and Henri Putkonen and I have ideated and gone through an extensive change program throughout 2024 and 2025.
The events and mentoring received basically solid, positive feedback. Similar wishes than in our prior (early 2022) survey were repeated, e.g. about varying weekly timings. Also, varying event themes – as we believe we are delivering – keep being wished for. Re-introducing professional-substance events with high-quality speakers was wished for. Meeting people was the biggest motivation to come.
Member donations, which are intended as one of several income streams for AFA, are supported by many (more than an adequate percentage to justify starting up), though not everyone personally.
No comments on AFA’s handling of the “Aalto Finance program matter,” which we have labored with and asked about; see below.
AFA Quarterly
With the lead of the Quarterly Editor-in-Chief Henri Putkonen, AFA Quarterly
launched a digital platform (alumni.aalto.finance),
revamped the Alumni Stories concept to include industry questions and contextual background,
launched a new Research Spotlight -series to bring shed light on influential research from the Faculty of Finance, and
continued with strong issues throughout the year, covering various industries through Alumni Stories.
OP Group’s CEO Timo Ritakallio continued our series of influential Senior Guest column authors. Also, for at least the second year, we purposely improved the visibility of the Quarterly’s content to students. The magazine can tell them about alumni life and AFA, and maybe even help a small bit with their studies- and career-shaping choices, as I believe our alumni profiles and hopefully AI articles may have done. Member feedback was excellent. Much thanks are due to Henri for all his work.
Events
AFA had a basically solid year of events. Our events aim at both enjoyment and career value for the members. They mostly received good or very good attendance. While “classic” events keep having demand for, AFA Golf, and more recently AFA Padel and AFA Piemonte Wine Tasting have been a positive addition. For example, September’s wine tasting got outstanding feedback and will resume. The Graduate Dinner (or Masters’ Dinner) is a valuable transition event and supports AFA’s membership acquisition. AFA Conference was on a break.
AFA and Finance merged Pre-Christmas parties, enabling “generations” to meet each other, and AFA is thankful for Finance’s support.
AFA’s full 2025 event list is this (with organizers found in AFA Quarterly Q3/2025): AFA Padel Tournament, AFA Afterwork, Graduate Dinner, AFA Golf ’25, AFA Piemonte Wine Tasting, Crayfish Party, and Pre-Christmas Party.
Change in the Aalto Finance program and its intake arrangements
Significant changes are planned to Aalto’s Finance degree structure and its admission, to improve it further. There are aspects in these significant changes that have created some concern among a part of our members and the board.
The board discussed the change along the fall and some of us have devoted quite some time for this. Via a task force, we discussed the changes with department representatives, emphasized the need for risk management, and also solicited views from all AFA members.
To support these discussions, the board had distilled three clusters of noteworthy risks: (1) that the changes might not attract a better applicant pool; (2) that students’ contacts to the broad Business-School student community could weaken; and (3) that narrower basic business studies would decrease degree quality. Also, though partly falling into those clusters, concerns related to a language change and de facto equal-opportunity student recruitment have been raised. Suggesting in the member survey to give feedback on this process of AFA’s board, we received no comments.
The faculty representatives’ answers to our concerns – which are broadly the same as what AFA’s members generally would pinpoint to us – did fairly broadly satisfy the board’s key questions on the riskiest matters from various viewpoints. However, success assumes good risk management, and opinions in AFA’s board vary as to whether the current risk management plans will suffice: AFA will continue offering relevant comments.
I myself believe the risks are manageable and also believe this change has significant upsides that are a joint interest and can, assuming good risk management, produce net value – even as the starting point is that of a leading European finance program. In fact, valid benchmark programs often use the model of direct application and a tailored degree structure. Furthermore, some of the upsides involve possibilities for Aalto Finance to even further strengthen its work and student community.
AFA’s revenue
I have since a point of time in 2023 been in charge of AFA’s general fundraising, though sharing that role during 2025. Each year, AFA faces significant costs that revenue needs to cover. The funding environment grew much more difficult for us in the winter 2003–2004, and our effort and thinking since then has worked to improve and standardize our products and to go through an extensive round of talks with current and prospective partners in the lead-up to 2025.
While a challenging period continued in 2025, AFA fortunately enjoyed solid fundraising performance and was able to positively adjust fees across the field. Examples below.
A key development during 2025 was transforming AFA Quarterly’s technology, which will give a significant partnering opportunity (by design).
Another key development was a 3-year partnership agreement with HR talent service agency aTalent (which I incidentally participated founding back in 2004, as a sidenote).
In the end, we ended the year with a well-bearable deficit of 11% of assets, short of the 17% budgeted.
Developing the AFA Board
From among a notoriously busy membership, AFA should be able to find a committed board that can give effort for both developing and running our operations well. Fortunately, as mentioned, we have a very good board – and truly many continue, which surely tells something about board work.
AFA is about to turn 10 years, and board development is a naturally called-for part of association maturation. One part of this is developing representativeness.
In the spring and fall of 2025, we solicited inputs for our list of such AFA members who could potentially contribute to our community in the board (and we also now encourage you to announce yourself or a friend, to me!).
Age representativeness has been improved year by year (this will help in sensing member needs and responding to them). The board now has an above-20-years age spread. As another measure, we just begun our third year with three board members in the 35–50 age category, and the first with three eldest aged 40–50. I believe, though, that further stretching is unneeded and possibly suboptimal, at least for the time being.
With improving other representativeness measures, we have been a bit slower – but that is not for the lack of trying!
The board’s tasks are broad and interesting, and our customarily large board ensures that the workload is not too big.
By the way, the board also maintains some “external relations” to peers: our work includes contacts to the Aalto community via the Aalto Alumni Council of associations. AFA certainly affords sharing some information with others, and we receive some ideas in turn as well.
Other work
Finally, several other developments took place.
Comms. We continued planning for systematicity and tweaks in member and partner communications, seeking that messages would truly reach our members’ eyes. We also added a WhatsApp Community.
Last wills. We started to ask that certain roles’ holders – currently the president, the COO, the CFO, the Chief Partnering Officer, and the AFA Quarterly Editor-in-Chief – write a “last will” for our document repository. This helps ensure the things AFA learns (long-term strategic goals, best practices, suggestions, things to avoid) will not need to be often rediscovered.
Bylaws. AFA started to gather needs for changes in AFA’s bylaws and edited a text proposal, since current rules leave room to clarify a number of things nowadays useful.
Misc. We finally adopted an e-signing service, prepared for new banking arrangements, and worried about necessary legal meeting routines eating up board time, for the freeing-up of which we developed a new procedure.
The Bull. The Presidents’ Bull, AFA’s version of the statue near Wall Street, was brought up to date by adding six years.
Further thanks to colleagues
I want to thank all in Board 2025 for the very good work they did. COO Jaakko Ahdekivi deserves special thanks for his impressive bearing of responsibility, quality and development orientation, and responsiveness. Jesse Hirvelä was and is a key pillar as our long-term vice president.
Markus Mäkelä is the Past President of AFA, serving as President in 2024–2025.