Employees At The Heart Of Digitalization Strategy

After a decade of client-provider collaboration, Arendt group acquired Mobilu, a Luxembourg IT company specialising in the digitalization and robotization of processes. The objective of the acquisition: to digitize Arendt & Medernach’s processes and customer relations. By acquiring the digital specialist Mobilu, Arendt reinforces its digital strategy in the legal, regulatory, and board consulting business by creating a dedicated structure.

Photo: Abdelhay Toudma, CIO of Arendt and David Iachetta, Founder of Mobilu / Credits © Silicon Luxembourg

Abdelhay Toudma, CIO of Arendt and David Iachetta, Founder of Mobilu explain the reasons for the merger, how they envision the collaboration of their respective teams, and how this marriage of their companies fits into their digital strategy.

Abdelhay Toudma and David Iachetta, why this sudden collaboration?

AT: It is a natural evolution. Our collaboration goes back to 2011. During this period, Mobilu worked on more traditional projects and in these they performed better than all users of ICT services.

Since then Arendt & Medernach has accelerated its digital transformation, notably by creating apps for its own needs and by becoming an internal developer of digital solutions.

This acquisition is based on the complementary synergy of our businesses: Mobilu has digital skills that we did not have and in return, we bring a technological environment on which Mobilu can rely on to grow.

For Arendt & Medernach moreover, it is necessary, more than ever, to develop and offer digital services to our customers: for providing them better services, for process optimization, and for time-saving. Our focus is on quality and simplicity. This acquisition is therefore part of the firm’s long-term digital strategy. David and I will each be co-CEO to better manage this transformation.

DI: Mobilu was able to bring the skills and experience in digital solutions that Arendt & Medernach was looking for to refine its digital strategy.

This complementarity in our businesses will help focus on digitech projects, such as the ever more advanced optimization of processes, the integration of new customers, the electronic signature of documents, the exchange of secure documents, all the preparation and management of committee meetings, and above all the optimization of customer relations by providing new services.

These processes are already in place internally, and we study wishe to deploy them for the use of our customers. To this end, secure and reliable tools that will be able to offer exceptional services to our clients are required, but the focus needs to remain on core advisory, regulatory, and legal services.

Moreover, thanks to this merger, Mobilu will use Arendt & Medernach’s infrastructure to host its own customers. This infrastructure meets the regulatory requirements of Luxembourg.

What will this acquisition change for the respective teams?

AT: My UX, DevOps, security, process management, and project management teams – a total of 30 people – have been working together with David’s teams for almost a decade. So they already know each other and are already working together in full complementarity.

With this merger, they will continue to work hand in hand on an ever-increasing number of high-potential digital projects. For both companies and for their respective clientele, this is an opportunity for joint development. Mobilu brings us the resources we lack in Luxembourg. The country and the GreaterRegion lacks sufficient talent in these fields.

DI: The Mobilu team has worked hard over the last few years to make a place for ourselves and have gained the trust of our clients and partners. Relying on all our employees, we are now ready to absorb organic growth (and why not external growth because it is dreams that drive us forward) in order to learn to thrive in the midst of new challenges.

Without the maturity and strength of the respective teams, this merger would never have been possible. From now on, the main objective is to give a new impetus to this collaboration and to mobilize all our resources in the service of the digital deployment strategy of the largest law firm in the Grand Duchy. It is therefore a unique and exciting challenge, which can only be beneficial for everyone.

What are the current and future technological challenges for a law firm?

AT: The CIO must first of all understand the requirements of the business and the nuances of its relationship with its clients. The CIO must master the specificities and contributions of new tools and techniques, so as to be able to explain them well to a sector, traditionally not very prone to transformation through technology.

With this in mind, Arendt &Medernach has always been able to make bold choices. During the pandemic, for example, we invested in technology with a focus on customer-centricity.

The second challenge is to convince your own team: when you start a project, you don’t have to persuade the business, but rather your employees, who have to take ownership of the project in order to bring it to a successful conclusion.

The momentum is there. The CIO is no longer reduced to being a simple IT service provider. Now, they advise, take part in transformative decision-making, and intervene and provide strategic support for development.

DI: In the current context, the acquisition of a small agile structure in the digital sector, like ours, by a large group like Arendt seals a trend that will develop even more in the future. The lesson here is that all businesses, including law firms, must digitalize in an agile way, with a mindset that constantly pushes towards questioning and redefining their strategy.

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