A short announcement with a longer explanation: I have invested in 20 percent of Ace Solutions AS, a company headquartered in Oslo that delivers integrated security, entrance control and cash management technology to retailers and enterprises. For readers who know my background, this will not come as a surprise. For everyone else, here is why.
Familiar ground
Much of my career has been spent in cash automation. The oldest articles on this blog come straight out of that world: a TLS library for a PIC24 microcontroller inside a cash handling device, MQTT on small microcontrollers, and debouncing noisy telemetry from devices in the field. Safes, cash recyclers, deposit units and the gates and barriers that control who gets into a building are hardware products with a lot of software inside, installed in places where failure is expensive and nobody technical is on site.
Ace Solutions lives in exactly that space. They work with manufacturers such as Gunnebo and with Nordic service partners, and they sell, install and support the equipment that stores, banks and offices rely on every day. I know the products, I know the customers, and I know where the software side of the business has room to grow. That combination is rare enough that when the opportunity came up, I did not need long to decide.
What Ace Solutions does
The company organises itself around five areas.
Safe storage. Safes, cabinets, locks, vaults and safe deposit systems, with the certifications and features needed to protect cash, documents and valuables against burglary, fire and explosion. This is the oldest part of the security business and still the foundation of the rest.
Entrance control. Turnstiles, speed gates and vehicle barriers, integrated with access control so that a building knows who is inside. Anyone who has walked through an office lobby in Oslo has probably passed through a gate from one of their partners.
Cash management. Closed cash handling for retail and banking: recyclers and deposit units that count, validate and store notes and coins so that staff never handle an open till. This is where I have spent the most years, and where I have the strongest opinions.
Loss prevention. Everything that reduces shrink in a store, from cash handling procedures to the data that shows where the losses actually happen.
Business operations. The service and software layer that keeps the installed base running: monitoring, maintenance, reporting and the integrations that connect a safe or a gate to the systems a business already uses.
The last two are the ones that interest me most, because they are where hardware turns into a service.
Why this one
Three reasons, in the order they convinced me.
- The installed base is an IoT fleet. Thousands of devices in stores and offices, each with a controller, a network connection and a maintenance contract. Monitoring them, updating them and getting useful telemetry out of them is the same problem I have written about for years, applied to equipment that already has a paying customer behind it.
- Retail is changing under the equipment. I have written about autonomous and frictionless stores and about what the big retail shows say is coming. Fewer tills, more self-service, longer opening hours and smaller staff all change what a store needs from its security and cash equipment. A company that understands both the hardware and the retail trends has an advantage.
- It is Nordic and close. Ace Solutions serves Norway, Sweden and the wider Nordic market from Oslo. The customers are companies I can visit, the installations are places I can walk into, and the decisions are made by people I can sit down with.
A financial investment, not a job
To be clear about what this is and is not: I will not be involved in the day-to-day business. Ace Solutions has its own management and its own people, and they run the company. My stake is a financial investment in a field I know well and still find fascinating, made because I believe in the direction and in the people, not because I am looking for a new role. I will follow it the way a shareholder should: with interest, with questions at the right moments, and otherwise out of the way.
What it does give me is a reason to keep paying attention to an industry I spent most of my career in. Expect the themes to surface here from time to time: monitoring a fleet of cash devices, the security of equipment that is itself a security product, and how a business built on installing hardware adapts as retail changes. Those will be observations from the outside, not reports from the inside.
Questions for you
- If you run stores: what would you want to know about your cash and security equipment every morning, without asking anyone?
- Those of you in facilities or office management: do entrance gates make your building safer, or just slower, and what would change your answer?
- For the engineers: what is the hardest part of adding telemetry to equipment that was designed to be stand-alone?
Write to me at bjorn.nostdahl@nostdahl.com. I read everything, and the best answers tend to become articles.