Striving, Scaling or Sailing?

Executive Summary

The Nordics’ early success at moving away from cash, its embrace of collaborative models for the development and distribution of innovative financial services long before fintech became every bank’s favourite bandwagon, and commitment to digital services have created the foundations for a thriving fintech ecosystem.

Combined with strong IT infrastructure, healthy national economies, and financially literate, highly-banked populations – over the last decade the region has become a testbed for the future of financial services, and in the process a live experiment of how collaboration between policymakers, finance and entrepreneurs could shape how we manage the economy of the future.

This is a region where size is no obstacle to success or ambition. By looking at the data collected from the Global Fintech Index during 2020 and insights from a wide range of more than 30 interviews across the ecosystem, ‘Striving, scaling or sailing?’, explores the data behind the success.