Success story · Coworking

A former bank in Porvoo, opened by phone

CoSpace Finland rents workspace by the hour. That only works if getting in is as easy as booking — so the old access control system went, and the phone became the key.

The CoSpace ONE building in the centre of Porvoo on a winter evening, lit up in the snow — CoSpace has occupied this building — an old, rather grand former bank — in the centre of Porvoo since 2017.

CoSpace Finland Oy offers coworking space to companies and to individuals: desks, workspaces, meeting rooms, seminar rooms — and a sauna. Customers get high-speed internet, printing, copying and scanning. Space can be booked for as little as two hours.

That last detail is the whole problem. When customers arrive and leave all day, for stays measured in hours, access control has to be effortless to run and impossible to get wrong. CoSpace had been looking for a system that could keep up, and not finding one.

“We rent the selected space for a minimum of two hours, and because of customers coming and going, access control has to be smooth and easy to manage.”
Petter LarsenCEO, CoSpace Finland

From a conference conversation to a live building

Petter Larsen met Bitwards CEO Eljas Saastamoinen at an international conference and heard about the platform there. CoSpace adopted it in 2018, becoming one of Bitwards' first customers — and Mobile Access replaced the legacy access control system in the building outright.

A hand holding a phone showing the CoSpace doors in the Bitwards app, beside an open office door — Every door in the house — the HUB entrances, the third-floor open office, the restaurant — is a line in the app.

“The Bitwards solution suits our needs perfectly. The technology is safe, reliable, flexible and user-friendly. There is no need to physically meet a customer, as it is possible to allow access remotely. The user-friendliness is of particular importance to us because many of our customers occasionally need to use the facilities only for a short time.”
Petter LarsenCEO, CoSpace Finland

And then the building across the street

The second test of an access system is what happens when you add a building. CoSpace opened a HUB — a meeting and teamwork space — directly opposite, and put it on the same platform, with lockers under consideration after that.

“Another big advantage of this system is that it is scalable. We have already implemented the smart key platform in a building that we opened just opposite CoSpace.”
Petter LarsenCEO, CoSpace Finland

Today the Finnish high-tech company Lamor Plc works from the same premises — a tenant of a different size and kind, on the access control that a two-hour meeting-room booking already proved.

Porvoo old town at dusk in winter, wooden houses and the cathedral above the river — Porvoo old town, a few minutes from the door.

Quotations from “Bitwards converts smartphones into keys” by Tuomas Lehtonen, published in Ilta-Sanomat on 13 March 2021; English translation by Katariina Benedetti.