Featuring the nordic fintech Highlights

Networking & Breakfast

Kicking off the day, Pål Krogdahl and Ville Sointu bring the latest signals, shifts, and conversations shaping the Nordic fintech landscape. Through their Fintech Daydreaming podcast and monthly collaboration with Nordic Fintech Highlights, they have become trusted voices decoding the region’s most important fintech developments.

As Europe moves beyond PSD2 toward the Financial Data Access framework (FIDA), open finance is entering a new phase that could significantly expand how financial data is shared, accessed, and used across the economy. The shift from open banking to open finance has the potential to reshape competition, innovation, customer control, and the future structure of financial services in Europe.

In this session, an official from the Ministry of Finance of Finland explores the current state of open finance regulation, the ambitions behind FIDA, and what the next generation of financial data infrastructure could mean for banks, fintechs, and consumers across the Nordic and European financial ecosystem.

Banks are facing growing pressure from every direction: new regulation including FIDA, PSD3, and T+1 settlement, rising customer expectations for real-time and always-available services, increasing competition from fintechs and neo brokers, and continued pressure on profitability. While AI is widely seen as the answer to many of these challenges, its true potential depends on the strength of the underlying banking infrastructure.

This fireside chat explores why the future of banking innovation starts with the foundation. From core banking modernization and real-time data architecture to automation, interoperability, and open ecosystems, the discussion examines what banks must do to build resilient technology foundations capable of supporting AI-driven transformation without increasing operational risk.

As open finance expands beyond payments into broader financial data ecosystems, the battle for customer relationships, trust, and distribution is intensifying. Banks, fintechs, platforms, and technology providers are all competing to define their role in the emerging data economy, where customer value increasingly depends on seamless experiences, personalization, and intelligent use of financial data.

This panel explores how open finance is reshaping value chains, the strategic choices institutions face in positioning themselves within the ecosystem, and who may ultimately own the customer relationship in the next generation of financial services.

AI is rapidly transforming how financial institutions assess, manage, and respond to credit risk. By combining advanced analytics, real-time data, and machine learning, banks and lenders can accelerate decision-making, improve accuracy, and create more dynamic and scalable credit processes.  This case presentation explores how AI is being applied in practice to modernize credit risk operations, from underwriting and fraud detection to customer assessment and portfolio monitoring. The session will highlight both the opportunities and challenges of implementing AI in one of banking’s most critical and regulated functions.

See the next level of hyper-personalised banking live. Behavioural data has become the single most defensible asset for your bank. Our platform uses AI to help Nordic banks and insurers act proactively and turn data signals into revenue.

AI is rapidly transforming financial services, creating new opportunities for automation, customer experience, risk management, and operational efficiency. But for regulated banks, the challenge is not only how to innovate fast, but how to do so responsibly while managing compliance, governance, security, and trust.

In this keynote, Qred Bank shares practical lessons from scaling AI within a fast-growing regulated banking environment. Drawing from its journey as a six-time FT1000 winner, the session explores how banks can balance innovation with control, move from experimentation to implementation, and build AI capabilities that create real business value without compromising resilience or customer trust.

As platforms increasingly own the customer relationship and transaction flow, a new generation of embedded financial services is emerging directly inside software ecosystems. Using Wolt Capital as a case study, this session explores how embedded lending is helping platforms drive merchant growth, loyalty, and ecosystem expansion while reshaping the traditional role of banks.

This case presentation will examine the rise of platform finance, why software companies are becoming powerful distributors of SME financial services, and how data, payments, and embedded experiences are transforming lending from a standalone banking product into a seamless part of digital commerce.

Europe has made major progress toward a unified financial market through SEPA and digital banking regulation, yet real-world fragmentation still persists. Consumers continue to face IBAN discrimination, while businesses operating across borders encounter inconsistent access to banking services, payments, and financial infrastructure.

This fireside chat explores whether Europe is truly ready for borderless banking and how fintech infrastructure, embedded finance, and new digital financial models may accelerate integration faster than traditional banking structures. The discussion will examine the remaining barriers to financial interoperability, what greater cross-border access could mean for SMEs and consumers, and whether Europe can finally deliver a seamless banking experience across the continent.

Embedded finance has transformed how financial services are delivered - but the next shift is even more profound. In this keynote, CEO Terje Kjøs explores how embedded finance evolves from channels and context, driven by convenience, to its next level: autonomous execution as agentic AI begins to execute decisions and reshape customer behavior.

This keynote is a bit different. Maybe slightly provocative. Possibly an experiment.

There will be no infrastructure walkthrough. No selling. No recycling the industry hype you’ve already read twice this week. We can all agree we’re overwhelmed enough.

Christie H. Kristensen has spent years in financial technology - watching, building, and translating the shift from the inside. She has seen what disruption actually looks like when it hits institutions that weren’t ready. And the biggest threat to banks isn’t technology. It’s irrelevance. Human irrelevance!

In this session, she’ll challenge how we think - not what we build. Why do we keep using inside-out language like “Banking-as-a-Service” when the customer never asked for it? Why are we still centring the conversation around technology when the real signals are in behaviour, markets, and the moments where financial decisions actually matter?

It’s time to reinvent yourself or your business  - as we’re all in transit navigating a world moving faster than ever through AI, change, and constant disruption.

As customer expectations shift toward seamless digital journeys, banking is increasingly moving from standalone financial products into embedded experiences integrated directly into retail, e-commerce, and marketplace ecosystems.
This session explores how banks and fintechs can drive growth by embedding financial services into everyday customer journeys, while redefining distribution, partnerships, and the role of banking in the digital economy.

‍

As financial services become increasingly embedded into digital platforms and customer journeys, banks are moving further into the background while distribution, user experience, and customer ownership shift toward platforms, marketplaces, and software ecosystems. In this new landscape, financial institutions must rethink how they create value, maintain visibility, and build loyalty when the banking experience becomes almost invisible to the end user.

This panel explores how embedded finance is reshaping the economics of distribution, customer relationships, and financial product delivery. The discussion will examine where banks and underwriters can create exceptional customer experiences, where friction and trust can break down after onboarding, and how financial institutions can position themselves to succeed as embedded finance continues to redefine the competitive landscape.

As fintech enters a new era shaped by AI, embedded finance, digital identity, and geopolitical realignment, the importance of ecosystems, collaboration, and strategic market positioning is becoming more critical than isolated innovation. In this fireside chat, Moonika Liikamaa and Tuomas Toivonen explore why ecosystems increasingly define competitive advantage in financial services and what role Helsinki can play as the Nordic gateway to the Eurozone.

The discussion examines how Finland has built globally influential fintech capabilities, why Helsinki is uniquely positioned as a launch platform into the Nordic and European markets, and how the next decade of fintech may be shaped by AI, embedded finance, and the growing need for Europe to strengthen its own financial infrastructure and innovation ecosystems.

Embedded finance is evolving beyond payments into a new era of reusable trust under eIDAS 2.0. This session explores how EU Digital Identity Wallets and Business Wallets can unlock seamless onboarding, reusable KYC/KYB, Age Verification, cross-border financial services, and entirely new embedded finance opportunities across Europe.

As identity becomes portable and verifiable, fintechs, banks, and platforms have an opportunity to reduce friction, expand access, and build the next generation of trusted digital financial experiences.

The session will include live demos showing how EUDI based onboarding, KYC/KYB, and verification work seamlessly within embedded finance flows.