We’re already a quarter into the year, and fintech leaders in the Nordics and Baltics are pushing forward with their mission-driven efforts. Despite the multitude of distractions, these founders maintain a critical balance between the essential and the necessary, propelling them toward their goals while navigating the challenges of progress. We reached out to five founders to discover their priorities for 2024. Their responses were as diverse as they were insightful, yet all were united by the unrelenting dedication to realising their vision, despite the hurdles and challenges they face. Here are some of the key priorities that are shaping the fintech landscape in 2024.
In 2024, as a RegTech founder, I’m steering Vespia towards transforming AML compliance into a more accessible and efficient process. We aim to replace outdated manual methods and error-prone decision-making with AI-driven solutions. This approach isn’t just about following trends; it’s about genuinely easing the workload for compliance officers. Our focus is on crafting straightforward, user-friendly systems for fintechs, facilitating easier account openings and financial transactions. This is especially crucial in emerging markets like Africa, Asia, and South America, where fintech growth is often hindered by limited AML expertise. Vespia is committed to breaking down these barriers and promoting financial inclusion and innovation.
Julia Ront, Co-founder and CEO at Vespia
“Changing the value the value chain in corporate payments.
At ZTL, we deliver an embedded end-to-end payment platform for businesses. Our objective is to change the value chain in corporate payments by enabling ERP system owners to go from being a re-distributor of a banks payment service, to become the proprietary owner of the payment service. As such, we turn the ERP system owner into “the bank”, allowing them to develop profitable business models around their corporate payment services.
With more than 10 000 corporate customers on the platform in Norway already, our focus is to leverage on our existing infrastructure at scale and go into production with several ERP partners in Sweden and Denmark during 2024.”
Andreas Bjerke, CEO at ZTL Payment Solution
As a fintech founder in 2024, my priorities lie in continuing to work towards our vision of helping as many SMEs as possible with financing, despite the macroeconomic situation. In these times, leveraging technology and collaboration is crucial not only for solving specific issues, but it also provides mutual benefits and competitive advantages to the companies solving these issues. For Froda, our main focus will be to continue to improve our embedded financing platform and attract more partners across Europe, in order to give as many European SMEs as possible access to financing.
Oliver Mohseni, co-founder at Froda.
In 2024, we at PayAnalytics by beqom are focused on supporting organizations across the world in building equitable workplaces, using statistics, machine learning and optimization. A key focal point is the European Pay Transparency Directive – all organizations in Europe need to get ready to explain their pay structure, publish pay bands and ensure pay equity – the era of compensation as a black box is over. As a result, we are expanding our technology toolkit to support organizations on their pay transparency and equity journey. In 2024 we are focused on our core, bringing best-in-class compensation technology tools into the hands of compensation specialists and managers.
Margret – Associate Professor of Management Science and Statistics at University of Maryland, co-Founder of PayAnalytics
As a fintech founder in 2024, my strategic focus centers on leveraging the transformative capabilities of Request-to-Pay (R2P) to drive innovation and deliver tangible value to businesses and consumers within the European market. My tactical mission for this year is to position Pinecone as the premier choice for banks seeking integration with the SEPA Request-to-Pay (R2P) system.
R2P, characterized by its use-case-agnostic, currency-agnostic, and payment-method-agnostic messaging layer, serves as a foundational framework for new payment and e-invoicing services in Europe.
We have identified over 20 potential use cases for R2P, indicative of its vast potential. Notably, R2P offers substantial advantages over open banking and local schemes.
Sami Karhunen CEO and Co-Founder at Pine&Cone Oy