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Headline lessons
Epassi started as an internal problem inside Eficode. Risto founded Eficode in 2005, and a couple of years later, when the company had roughly 30 developers, employees wanted sports vouchers as a benefit. Risto Virkkala and Tommy Sarja looked at the paper vouchers and thought the whole setup felt like a “seventies thing,” which pushed them to ask why the category had not modernised.
Risto using Epassi to pay for lunch
Tommy Sarja
The early team setup came directly out of that context. Tommy was first working at Eficode and then moved over when they founded Epassi. It was as if Epassi was born within the nest of Eficode, which made it easy for employees to transfer between the companies.
In practice, they kept it simple. If Epassi needed work, Epassi paid Eficode for the doing, and people could later shift onto Epassi’s payroll. They even stayed in the same office until around COVID, separating only once both companies had grown and acquisitions made it impossible to stay under one roof.
Epassi’s wedge was the incentive structure behind paper sports vouchers. Before Epassi, voucher provider companies’ earning logic depended on unused vouchers. Risto saw that if the benefit becomes digital, you cannot hide behind “unused vouchers” in the same way, which is why he believed incumbents were structurally unable to digitalise the product in a straightforward, transparent way.
That created an opening for a new entrant with a different model. They were not trying to win on a nicer interface. They believed that a product designed for real usage, with clearer economics, could exist precisely because the old model was tied to breakage. This is also where the idea of transparency starts to matter, because digital forces clarity about what gets used and what it costs.
From the start, the intent was bigger than solving it only for themselves. Building it for themselves came out necessity as they saw the voucher system to be flawed, however, their ambition lied in offering this as a product to other companies.
They validated by staying in conversation with different companies from the start. They began talking to potential customers immediately, even when the product was still raw. At the same time, they used their own team in the development phase, so the internal loop and the external loop ran in parallel.
The customer conversations were practical. They asked what problems companies had had with paper sports vouchers, and how they would react to a digital alternative. Through those discussions, Risto and the team started to see what would actually win in this category: a product where usage costs are transparent.
Those same conversations also broke an early assumption. At the time, sports vouchers were fixed-value, and the team initially thought they would just recreate a digital version of four-euro vouchers. Talking it through with companies made Risto realise that carrying a legacy nominal value into a phone makes no sense, because digital payments can be any amount. That is the moment they realised the product turned into a wallet rather than a digital clone of the paper system.
The first MVP was deliberately narrow. How they defined it was by simply making the sports benefit work in one moment: paying at the point of sale. A concrete example of this was the swimming hall cashier. If people used to hand over a paper voucher at the counter, the question became how they could make that same payment happen with a phone.
They built it with the simplest technology that could complete the flow at the time. There were no apps yet, so they used mechanisms like SMS and an IVR phone call flow to get the transaction done. The goal at that time was to make the payment work reliably in real life.
As soon as the prototype was ready they got the first versions of it into the hands of users. They pulled in a large company in this phase, and offered them very favourable terms in the name of getting it into real customer use.