With the company’s mid-market and enterprise client base showing no signs of scaling down their tech and digitalisation investments despite the current economic headwinds, Metasite renewed and strategically strengthened its management team over the recent months:

• Aurelijus Norkūnas, who previously managed several IT companies and accumulated successful international business development experience in European, American and African markets, has joined the company as the new CEO.
• Jurga Rozgaitė-Ratner, currently managing five Metasite project delivery teams, will become the company’s Chief Operating Officer.
• Earlier in the year, Giedrius Vėgelė – previously with Barclays, Telia and Rocket Software – joined the Metasite leadership team as the new Chief Technology Officer, while the reins of our People & Culture team were handed over to Indrė Gabnienė, who had been serving as head of HR at several other technology companies.
• Mantė Januškevičienė and Indrė Chomentauskienė, who had been heading Metasite in Lithuania as Managing Director and COO, respectively, for well over a decade, will continue serving the company as non-executive board members, focusing on the company’s strategic development. Aldas Kirvaitis, who has been heading Metasite in the United Kingdom since 2018, remains chairman of the board.

Startups are hitting the brakes, but enterprises continue their march forward
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Having started in the early 2000s as a digital solutions development partner to Baltic and Nordic banks, insurers and telecommunications companies, over the last decade Metasite successfully reoriented itself towards building bespoke digital solutions for global financial industry giants in the world’s leading financial centres of London, Zurich, Geneva and New York.
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Commenting on the company’s near-future outlook, Metasite chairman Aldas Kirvaitis says the company expects to continue growing during 2023 despite the current macro challenges.
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“Unlike many of the early stage fintech and regtech startups and scale-ups who are currently struggling to raise new venture funding rounds and therefore have been forced to scale back their technology investments, most mid-market and enterprise scale financial institutions Metasite works with appear committed to their multi-year digital transformation plans, and some have been even increasing their 2023 budgets for digital product development and legacy systems modernisation. Since these larger organisations account for around 70 per cent of Metasite business, we remain cautiously optimistic about the continued growth of our business in 2023.”

Aldas Kirvaitis
Metasite Chairman

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According to Mr Kirvaitis, recent softening in valuations experienced by fintech startups has also visibly influenced the technology talent market across Europe: some of the most capable software developers, business analysts, quality assurance engineers and product managers have started shying away from startups in favour of larger financial institutions and other established enterprises – while the technology professionals preferring the higher autonomy, empowerment and flexibility offered by smaller organisations turn to established digital product development firms serving global institutional clients.
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“In uncertain times like these, when many startups have lost their shine or have started downsizing their tech teams, we can offer challenging software engineering projects in combination with financial stability and relative job security. In the current market many talented software development professionals find our proposition attractive.”

Aldas Kirvaitis
Metasite Chairman
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Helping institutions keep digital transformation projects on track despite IT hiring freezes
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According to Metasite CEO Aurelijus Norkūnas, due to economic turbulence, many banks and insurance companies may be looking to cut costs in numerous areas, but most so far have been choosing to preserve or even expand their investments into technology platforms modernisation and migrations from legacy on-prem infrastructure to the cloud or hybrid environments. The latest Forrester research also confirms this.
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“Under the shadow of a looming economic recession, many global financial industry players have frozen all new hiring, including into their internal IT teams – but have not cancelled the sizeable multi-year digital transformation programmes kicked off during earlier years, and are still striving to get them completed on time. Many global financial giants are now addressing the shortage of in-house IT professionals by delegating more work to external software development partners who can offer the required capacity, skills and experience but more flexibly. We see this as an opportunity to further actively expand our work with major players within the global financial sector.”

Aurelijus Norkūnas
Metasite CEO

Founded in 1997, Metasite provides digital product development and legacy modernisation services to banks, payment institutions, insurance companies, investment managers and other financial sector companies in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the U.S. and other countries. The company’s clients include Man Group, Nasdaq, Vontobel Asset Management, Equiniti, British Land, Solum Financial, Bond Radar, Swedbank and many others. In September, the combined market capitalisation of all publicly traded Metasite clients amounted to US$77bn, while total assets under management by our customers exceeded US$820bn.

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