I spent nine years in Denmark, fully embedded in the Nordic fintech ecosystem, before I packed up and moved to the Baltics.
After five months of making my home amongst the most digital economies in Europe, the question I keep hearing time and time again is why?
The honest answer is that I followed the energy. After almost a decade of watching the Nordics define what good fintech looks like, I started noticing that the most interesting conversations I was having weren’t happening in Copenhagen anymore. They were happening in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. The founders were hungrier, sharp and ambitious. The regulators were quicker on the phone, accessible and willing to engage with market participants, and the ambition felt unreasonable in the best possible way. So I moved.
What I found here was a region that had been quietly building something extraordinary while most of Europe wasn’t paying attention. Three countries, six million people, and a financial services ecosystem that punches so far above its weight it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the continent. The Baltics are no longer an emerging fintech story. They are one of the most consequential fintech corridors in Europe, and the people building it are showing the rest of us how it should be done.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
The thing that hit me first was the closeness. In larger markets, regulators, fintechs, and the public sector exist in different worlds, divided by paperwork, hierarchy, and an institutional shyness about being seen together. In the Baltics, they’re in the same room, often at the same table, and frequently in the same conversation that started over coffee twenty minutes earlier. Juris Paegle, Visa’s Country Manager for the Baltics, described the regional regulators to me the way most fintech executives wish they could describe regulators anywhere. Open. Fast. Serious about compliance, but interested in helping companies succeed. That combination is almost unheard of in fintech. Here it’s just how things work.
Built Faster, Built Leaner, Built Global
That closeness produces speed, and speed is the thing that defines this region more than anything else. When Jakub Wieclaw took over Magnetiq Bank and pivoted the institution into a fintech-enabling bank, he didn’t spend three years building consensus. He read the market, made the call, and jumped into action. In 2025 alone, Magnetiq onboarded 95 new fintech clients and expanded into five countries, including Germany. A small bank from Latvia is now operating in the German market, not because they outspent the giants, but because they made decisions while the giants were still scheduling committees. That’s not a one-off. That’s the operating system of the entire region.
The global mindset is there from day one. Nobody in the Baltics builds for the local market and hopes the rest of the world catches on later. They build for Europe and the world from the first product spec, because the local market is too small to support the ambition these founders carry. Jeff App, a Latvian company, is rethinking what makes an individual credit worthy and implementing an innovative credit risk approach giving millions of customers in developing markets access to financial services they previously didn’t have. Lithuania has become one of the EU’s largest fintech hubs by number of licensed companies. Estonia built one of the most digitised public infrastructures on the planet and exported the model. None of this happened by accident. It happened because the people building here decided that being small was no excuse for thinking small.
From Small Markets to Global Impact
What I admire most, and what I think the rest of Europe consistently underestimates, is the region’s commitment to building and developing its own financial services. The Baltics didn’t wait for someone else to bring fintech to them. They built it themselves, in their own image, with a level of digital sophistication that makes a lot of larger markets look slow and over-engineered. The solutions that come out of this region have a particular quality to them. They’re elegant. They’re simple and they work. They solve real problems without dressing themselves up in unnecessary complexity. And then, almost without anyone noticing, they end up powering financial services at massive scale across Europe and beyond.
Look at what’s actually getting built here. Handwave, out of Riga, raised 3.6 million euros and signed a deal with Visa to integrate its palm recognition technology into Visa’s Token Management Service. A Latvian company is building the future of payments authentication for one of the largest payment networks in the world. Mifundo, an Estonian fintech, is showing the market that credit scores can be ported across jurisdictions, helping customers access financial services abroad without the need to build their credit histories from scratch. These like countless other are companies that will be used by millions of Europeans every day and are being built out of cities most of the continent still struggles to find on a map
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
The opportunity here is enormous, and the people building it know it. What strikes me about the Baltic founders and operators I’ve met is how committed they are to seeing their local ecosystems rise. Mike Shafro, who built xpate from the Baltics into a global payments company, isn’t sitting on his success. He’s the main sponsor of the Baltic FinTech Awards because he understands that the next generation of Baltic fintech needs the same conditions that allowed his company to break out. The successful companies here don’t extract and leave. They reinvest, not just capital but know-how, expertise, and time. They mentor, they sponsor, they sit on panels eager to pass their knowledge onto up and coming generations of entrepreneurs. That kind of behaviour is what builds an ecosystem. Capital is easy. Commitment is rare.
The Next Chapter of European Fintech Is Being Written Here
And the digital savvyness is something else entirely. The Baltics have mastered the art of creating value for the industry through pure technical fluency. Nearly 80% of payments in Latvia are cashless. The talent coming out of TalTech, Riga Business School, Tartu, and Vilnius universities is world-class, and are building deep expertise in financial services and regulatory knowledge that other markets are now trying to replicate. The infrastructure is fast, the consumers are ready, and global companies are choosing the Baltics as a live production environment for products that will eventually scale across the continent. The region is a sandbox where ideas don’t get watered down for bigger markets. They get stress-tested at full strength and exported as the real thing.
That’s the story we’ve been documenting in this issue, and that’s why on the 13th of May we’re gathering in Riga for Baltic FinTech Days and the Baltic FinTech Awards. The awards exist to put names and faces on the work that’s been happening for years without enough recognition. Not the loudest voices on LinkedIn, but the operators who are building things that matter, hiring across the region, and pulling capital and attention into the Baltics.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
I moved to the Baltics because I wanted to be closer to the work that I think will define the next chapter of European fintech. Nine years in the Nordics taught me what a mature ecosystem looks like. Living in the Baltics is teaching me what a hungry one looks like, and the difference matters. The Nordics built the playbook and the Baltics are writing the next one. The rest of Europe should pay attention, because what’s coming out of these three countries isn’t a regional curiosity. It’s the future of financial services, being shipped at a pace the rest of the continent will eventually have to keep up with.
