Stockholm likes to think of itself as a lab for the future. This week, that reputation gets put to the test again. From 28 September to 2 October, Stockholm ImpACT Days brings together innovators, investors and city-builders under the theme Re:think Cities – a call to rework how we build, move, eat and care for one another in urban environments strained by climate change and rapid growth.
Most of the conversation around “rethinking cities” gravitates toward hardware: heat pumps, EV charging, vertical farms. But underneath every retrofit, every solar rollout, every circular business model, there’s a financing question – who pays, who profits, and who gets left out. That’s where fintech quietly does its heaviest lifting. Sweden, already home to Klarna and Tink, has spent the last several years incubating a second wave of fintechs whose products are aimed less at moving money faster and more at moving it somewhere better.
1. Doconomy – putting a price tag on everyday choices
Doconomy’s core idea is deceptively simple: every transaction has a carbon footprint, and most people have no idea what it is. The Stockholm-based climate-fintech built a transaction-level carbon and water-impact calculator – the Åland Index – that banks and card issuers plug directly into their apps, turning an anonymous purchase into a visible environmental data point. With partnerships spanning Mastercard, Nordea and banks across nearly 20 countries, Doconomy has quietly become infrastructure for sustainable consumption at scale, nudging millions of city-dwellers toward smaller footprints one swipe at a time. It’s a fitting headline act for a week built around rethinking daily urban behavior.
2. Hemma – financing the renovation wave, one apartment at a time
Sweden’s building stock is old, and heating it sustainably is one of the least glamorous but most urgent parts of the climate transition. Hemma built a fully digital platform for green mortgages, helping homeowners access better lending terms tied to energy-efficiency certifications while guiding them toward the renovations – better insulation, heat pumps, solar – that actually move the needle. In a country where a “renovation wave” is meant to unlock tens of billions of euros in climate investment over the next decade, Hemma is the plumbing that gets capital to individual front doors, one of the most literal expressions of “rethinking cities” from the ground up.
3. Normative – giving companies an honest carbon balance sheet
You can’t fix what you don’t measure, and for years corporate carbon accounting was a guessing game. Normative built what it calls the first true carbon accounting engine, letting businesses – including the retailers, logistics firms and property managers that make up a city’s economic fabric – trace emissions across their full value chain, not just their own operations. As urban businesses face mounting pressure to report and cut Scope 3 emissions, Normative’s tooling is becoming the quiet backbone that makes credible net-zero commitments possible rather than aspirational.
4. Green Assets Wallet – bringing transparency to the bonds that build cities
Green bonds increasingly fund the unglamorous urban essentials – energy grids, public transit, water systems, sustainable real estate. But investors have long struggled to verify that “green” money is actually doing what it claims. Spun out of the Stockholm Green Digital Finance initiative, Green Assets Wallet built an independent platform tracking the real-world impact data behind hundreds of labelled bond issuers, from energy providers to property companies. It’s a less visible piece of the puzzle than a solar panel or a bike lane, but without this kind of accountability infrastructure, city-scale green financing runs on trust alone.
5. Trine – proving that impact investing can also just be good investing
Not every fintech rethinking cities is doing it in Stockholm’s backyard. Gothenburg-based Trine lets everyday investors – starting from as little as €25 – fund solar energy projects for households, schools and hospitals in emerging markets, chasing what it calls a “triple return”: financial, social and environmental. It’s a reminder that the urban energy transition isn’t confined to wealthy Nordic capitals; the same crowdfunding logic that finances a Stockholm heat pump can just as easily electrify a clinic in Kenya. Trine’s inclusion in this lineup is a nod to the international, collaborative spirit ImpACT Days is trying to cultivate.
Why this matters for ImpACT Days
What ties these five together isn’t a shared product category – it’s a shared bet that urban transformation needs financial plumbing as much as it needs new technology. Rethinking how cities are built, financed and lived in is exactly the conversation Stockholm ImpACT Days is convening this week, and Swedish fintech has quietly built itself a seat at that table.
This article is part of Stockholm ImpACT Days – Re:Think Cities, bringing together businesses, innovators and changemakers to accelerate sustainable urban development.
Explore the full programme: https://www.stockholmbusinessregion.se/stockholm-impact-days/