The KEHA Centre’s cutting-edge integration platform stands in a league of its own within the Finnish government

The KEHA Centre, a key provider of digital services for Finnish government organisations and municipalities, developed the KIPA integration solution to streamline and automate data transfer between employment authorities and service providers. By offering a ready-made ecosystem for publishing information services, the platform enables service providers to connect faster, reduce development effort, and bring new services into use more efficiently.

When Finland’s TE24 reform set the course for transferring employment services to municipalities in early 2025, the KEHA Centre was faced with a major transformation. To support the reform, a centralised integration platform was required to connect employment regions with the providers of employment and integration-related information systems. Drawing on a long-standing partnership, the KEHA Centre selected Netum to play a pivotal role in designing and building the new ecosystem.

The goal was to build a modern, highly automated integration platform that would enable seamless, real-time data exchange between employment authorities and service providers. The platform would provide a secure and controlled way to transfer data services between different stakeholders. The project came with significant expectations, and every party involved was entering new territory. Even so, there was a strong sense of trust in both the partnership and the outcome from day one, says Mika Holst, Lead Specialist at the KEHA Centre.

— Previously, integrations were typically built as individual projects. Documentation varied in quality and, in some cases, was missing altogether. It quickly became clear that managing hundreds of data service subscriptions would require a modern integration platform and highly automated processes. Despite the scale of the challenge, we had complete confidence that, together with Netum, we would be able to make it happen, says Holst.

Information flow guaranteed

The development of the KIPA integration system (KIPA = Centralised Integration Service Platform) has been a highly impactful initiative from a societal perspective. Legislation requires employment authorities to use national information system services. In this context, KIPA serves as a centralised platform for publishing and sharing data services among different stakeholders. Today, all municipalities can use the integration platform to access data in ways that best support their specific needs. Data flows directly from information systems to end users through the platform.

Netum’s integration architect, Tero Nummijärvi, sees one of the platform’s key benefits as freeing up stakeholders’ resources to focus on their core responsibilities. Organisations no longer need to build and maintain their own integration solutions. The solution has been implemented in the Microsoft Azure environment, an area in which both Netum and the KEHA Centre have strong expertise.

— When technological expertise and its management are centralised in one place, all platform users can focus on what they do best and let the platform handle the message exchange. At the same time, data transfer remains secure, controlled, and consistent, Nummijärvi explains.

Service providers continuously publish new data services and APIs to the platform that support employment and integration. End users include, for example, employment authorities, government agencies, unemployment funds, and Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland). The KIPA integration platform acts as the ecosystem’s interface, bringing together data transfer between providers and users into a single hub. Huge amounts of data flow through the platform on a daily basis.

— Indirectly, the platform’s functionality affects almost every job seeker in this country, making it one of the most significant projects I have been involved in. For that reason, information security and data protection have also been key priorities throughout the development work, Nummijärvi says.

Acceleration through automation

The integration platform was officially launched at the beginning of 2025. It is under continuous development, and the most important reform currently in the pipeline is the development of a new p2p service portal.

Holst explains that the goal of the p2p portal is to provide service providers with a centralised operating model where the publication, management, and deployment of data services can be carried out significantly more efficiently than before. In the upcoming version, the level of automation will be so high that new information systems can be published directly to the platform without week-long development sprints. This will result in considerable savings in both time and cost, as manual effort in the deployment phase is no longer required.

— Service providers no longer need to build everything themselves. Automation can validate the quality of API descriptions and support the publication process, which speeds up the release phase by several weeks compared to the past. We have a highly advanced integration platform model that has also attracted interest elsewhere in central government, Holst says.

Years of collaboration have brought Netum’s and the KEHA Centre’s experts together into a seamless team.

— The strong expertise of Netum’s specialists has played a highly important role throughout the development work. Our collaboration combines deep technical expertise with strong practical implementation capability, and we have had access to both development resources and continuous support services, Holst says appreciatively.

Netum’s account director for the KEHA Centre, Toni Salminen, highlights the KEHA Centre as an exceptionally bold and forward-looking customer.

— Ideas and visions have been turned into reality. At the KEHA Centre, things are driven forward innovatively all the way into implementation, Salminen commends.