Episode 39: Technology Empowered Global Immigration with Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä

Business opportunities can emerge anywhere in the world and many corporations operate globally. This creates a huge demand for relocation and there are companies who send employees almost daily to different countries. Keeping up with immigration rules and regulations can be a huge task for any HR department and immigration professional, let alone for those who send employees to various different countries. In this episode, we talk to Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä from KPMG Finland about their work developing technology to streamline the immigrations processes at firms.  Octavian and Karita share their insights and experience on working with legal tech projects in multidisciplinary teams. We concentrate on one of their joint projects, Immigration Expert. The Immigration Expert tool helps people moving from one country to another to assess imigration requirements. Octavian and Karita tell us about the developing process and what were the initial problems (or the most common problems) in the immigration process the tool now solves. We also discuss how technology plays an inevitable role in creating better working practices and how Octavian and Karita see the role of tech in improving the performance of legal professionals. And because we love future predictions in this podcast, we also ask Octavian and Karita how do they see their work changing in the future and will technology play a more major role. Octavian (Tavi) Tantu is currently the Head of Tax & Legal Technology for KPMG Finland. His background is in Tax and Legal Technology and he has also worked as a tax and global mobility consultant. Throughout his career he has worked in various technology projects ranging from global mobility, immigration to tax preparation and global compliance applications in several different countries. As part of these projects he has fulfilled the roles of business analyst, product owner and service manager and has also helped implement and optimize the software development processes and technology teams. As a technology enthusiast, Tavi is always looking for new opportunities to help teams and businesses find the right balance of technology and process optimizations whilst constantly exploring new ways of collaborating and developing technology. Karita Niemelä works as a senior consultant within KPMG Finland’s People & Change department with strategic, change and project management consulting. Previously, Karita has worked within the Tax and Legal department with global mobility advisory. She has worked with various different client engagements and projects including organizational development and project management for clients from different sectors. Karita has also been part of the global technology project KPMG Global Immigration Expert and worked in daily collaboration with different stakeholders of the project and been part of the development and execution of the tool. As a consultant, her way of working is founded on organizational and process development with technology and people oriented mindset. Karita has studied business administration with strategic business development as her major and her thesis was about change management of digital servitization.