Welcome to the Nordic Fintech Snippets!
Hygge, Ikea, karjalanpiirakka, Björk & the cheese slicer. All Nordic inventions that improve the quality of life, add happiness and just generally spice up life. But following those innovations, we have turned our interest to innovating in finance and have something new to offer: financing platforms that improve eCommerce experiences, carbon footprint trackers, open banking solutions, AI-powered market intelligence solutions, and much more.
And that’s the basic setup for this newsletter. You might not have the resources to track all and everything the Nordics innovate in the financial industry (because we innovate a lot 😍), but we do.
Welcome to the Nordic Fintech Insights. The combined effort of all the Nordic Fintech Hubs, sharing the most important and latest news in fintech and digital finance from each country.
Featured: Nordic impact fintechs identified
There are almost 200 fintech startups in the Nordics working with solutions targeting one or more of the 17 SDG’s. Generally these companies focus in one of the following five topics: financial inclusion, financing impact, ESG data, energy & climate and anti-corruption and crime prevention.
To help spread knowledge of these companies, Copenhagen Fintech, TheFactory, NCE Finance Innovation, Helsinki Fintech Farm, Findec and The Fintech Cluster have done the first detailed mapping on the Nordic Impact Fintech startup scene that was published during the Copenhagen Fintech Week. Through the identification of these companies we hope to encourage new cooperation between these fintechs, established financial institutions and companies from various sectors.
Nordic highlights
Klarna a Nordic payments and shopping service, announced that it successfully raised $650 million in an equity funding round, at a post money valuation of $10.65 billion, which ranks Klarna as the highest-valued private fintech in Europe and now the 4th highest worldwide.
Vipps and Visa have announced a strategic partnership. Vipps, a Norwegian payments application, is looking to enter new markets through partnership and Visa is seeing this is an opportunity to allow their global partners develop easy, digital payments products.
Lunar Way has announced it will start using open banking account aggregation and payment initiation services technology from Nordic API Gateway. Nordic API Gateway has prior to this been chosen already by Danske Bank, Jyske Bank, OP Financial Group and Pleo. Lunar Way hopes the move helps them create a new, financial super app for managing all bank interactions in one place.
Country specific news
Finland
Mastercard lighthouse Fall 2020 cohort chosen
Holvi plans for new push in Ireland
ReceiptHero and CGI have signed an agreement
Denmark
Nordic fintechs head to Singapore on sustainability mission
Velliv to use fintech for new, low cost pensions products
Lunar Way & Nordic API Gateway
Worldline and Unwire join forces to transform public transportation use
Iceland
Meniga gets a $9.4 million investment
Sweden
Klarna reaches $10.65 billion valuation
NFT Ventures buys Collector Ventures portfolio for SEK 330M
Mynt seeks to make receipts history
Tink acquired OpenWrks’ aggregation platform
Swedish Open Payments raise €3 million
New legislation enables BIS fintech hub in Sweden
Zignsec launches in Africa supporting the growth of SimbaPay
Norway
Vipps agrees a distribution deal with Visa
Fintech startup Horde breaks Norwegian crowdfunding record
Future events
19.10.2020 Arctic15 – Fintech Track
23.10.2020 Becoming a card issuer in 2020s
17.3.2021 Nordic Fintech Summit
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