Fintech Daydreaming

Live from the floor of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, we are bringing you a special bite-sized edition of Fintech Daydreaming. Amidst the ambient conference noise, live stage pressure, and the ever-present threat of Pål finding a seamless way to plug Rip Out the Core, we actually managed to keep things brief and sit down with some of the sharpest minds in Nordic fintech for rapid-fire conversa...

Live from the floor of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, we are bringing you a special bite-sized edition of Fintech Daydreaming. Amidst the ambient conference noise, live stage pressure, and the ever-present threat of Pål finding a seamless way to plug Rip Out the Core, we actually managed to keep things brief and sit down with some of the sharpest minds in Nordic fintech for rapid-fire conversa...

Live from the floor of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, we are bringing you a special bite-sized edition of Fintech Daydreaming. Amidst the ambient conference noise, live stage pressure, and the ever-present threat of Pål finding a seamless way to plug Rip Out the Core, we actually managed to keep things brief and sit down with some of the sharpest minds in Nordic fintech for rapid-fire conversa...

Live from the floor of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, we are bringing you a special bite-sized edition of Fintech Daydreaming. Amidst the ambient conference noise, live stage pressure, and the ever-present threat of Pål finding a seamless way to plug Rip Out the Core, we actually managed to keep things brief and sit down with some of the sharpest minds in Nordic fintech for rapid-fire conversa...

Welcome to a very special episode of FinTech Daydreaming, recorded in official partnership with Mobey Forum! This week, hosts Ville and Pål—who accidentally showed up in matching Mobey Forum hoodies—are joined by two heavy hitters in the cybersecurity space: Juha Vesanto, Head of the new Quantum and AI Research Center at OP Pohjola, and André Schmidt, Secure AI Lead at Accenture. Together, the pan...

Welcome to a(nother) special edition of FinTech Daydreaming as Ville and Pål welcome back a friend of the show, futurist, author, and Moven co-founder Brett King to preview his upcoming book, Bank 5.0. After some lively banter covering Amazon ranking milestones for banking authors, the conversation shifts to the profound technological transformations reshaping the financial universe. In this episo...

Welcome back to another Nordic FinTech Highlights edition of FinTech Daydreaming! Ville takes the host's chair this week, fresh off his short vacation, to guide Pål and Janne through what has been the busiest month of the year for Nordic fintech news. After a quick a celebration of Pål’s new book hitting #10 on Amazon’s banking new releases, the trio dives into the biggest September headlines...

Welcome to a special live edition of Fintech Daydreaming recorded live from the PostTrade360 conference stage in Stockholm! For this unique session the usual dynamic is completely inverted. Olaf Ransome steps into the host chair while Ville and Pål take the guest seats. They are joined by Liz Oakes who brings her extensive policy experience and payments expertise to the panel. After a quick penalt...

Welcome back to another edition of Nordic FinTech Highlights! This month, Pål and Janne are joined by a heavily jet-lagged Ville, who is battling through Zoom technical gremlins after an eight-day trip to the US West Coast. Fresh off a stateside marathon of exceptional progressive house and trance music, Ville powers through to help cover the biggest August headlines across the Nordic fintech land...

Here at Fintech Daydreaming, we pride ourselves on the unedited, "live" feel of our recordings. Over the years, our listeners have been treated to everything from a hotel maid walking in on Ville, to New York police sirens, to Ville's automatic hydroponic garden sounding suspiciously like someone taking a bathroom break off-camera. This week however we successfully navigated the reco...

We are gearing up for Nordic Fintech Week with an exclusive, jam packed two guest episode! Ville and Pål sit down with two heavyweights of the European financial technology space to discuss everything from building challenger banks to the impending robot takeover. One thing we learned at least: we could’ve made this episode easily four hours long (but we didn’t, don’t worry). 🚀 Ken Villum Klausen...

July in the Nordics usually consists of out-of-office autoreplies and mosquito bites, but while we were all on vacation, the European Central Bank was busy clearing the table. Pål and Ville are back to the microphones alongside the ever-insightful Janne Salminen from Helsinki Fintech Farm, to unpack it all. Here is what we are dissecting in our Nordic Fintech Highlights season 14 return: 🇪🇺 The Di...

We have somehow survived long enough to make it to Season 14, and to kick things off, Ville is putting his co-host Pål in the hot seat. Pål actually went and published a brand new book, Rip Out the Core, proving that at least one half of this podcast is capable of being productive. We start the episode with a vintage Pål joke about minting meme coins. We will not spoil the punchline here, but let&...

Your favorite fintech nerd hosts Pål Krogdahl and Ville Sointu are joined by Janne Salminen from Helsinki Fintech Farm to close out the season before heading off to their summer holidays. We skipped the standard news roundup this time to reflect on the season, make some bold predictions, and let Pål shamelessly plug his upcoming book. Here’s what the guys daydreamed about in our season finale: 🤖...

We finally did it. We recorded an episode about legacy and somehow ended up discussing drones, artillery, aviation safety culture, and why bankers apparently don’t need pockets in their suits. In this episode of Fintech Daydreaming, we’re joined by Erik Åkesson to unpack one of the most overused and misunderstood words in banking: legacy. Is it the root of all evil? Or is it actually the thing kee...

We are out of the studio, trying our best to look respectable, and recording live in front of a real, breathing audience at the Nordic Fintech Summit right here in Helsinki! If you hear cheering, it’s probably for the free coffee, but we’ll pretend it’s for us. In this special live-stage episode, Pål and Ville manage not to trip over the stage wires while unpacking a massive lineup of regional hea...

In this episode of Fintech Daydreaming, Ville and Pål are joined by Riikka Laine-Tolonen, CEO of S-Pankki: a bank that started from grocery shopping and somehow ended up managing billions. Riikka walks us through the origin story of S-Pankki - born from a retail cooperative, supercharged by the famous S-bonus, and launched just in time for the 2008 financial crisis (great timing, obviously). Fast...

Welcome back to another monthly Nordic Fintech Highlights episode of Fintech Daydreaming! In this one, your hosts start off by complaining about what a slow news month it was—only to be immediately corrected by Janne, who points out that April was actually buzzing with funding rounds. Here’s what we covered: The Agentic Economy: Pål highlights SolvaPay, a Swedish fintech that just secured 2.5 mill...

In this episode of Fintech Daydreaming, Ville and Pål are joined by Baard Slaattelid from Vipps MobilePay - a man who casually drops phrases like “closed-loop wallet,” “payment potato,” and “we accidentally enabled cross-border in five minutes” like it’s just another Tuesday in payments. We start where all great fintech podcasts begin: with bad jokes (courtesy of AI, no less), and a host who may o...

In this episode of Fintech Daydreaming, Ville, Pål, and Janne are back with another round of Nordic Fintech Highlights—recorded somewhere between back-to-back meetings, holiday travel plans, and at least one log cabin in the Finnish wilderness (buffering included). From there, we dive into what actually happened in Nordic fintech last month: Modest funding rounds, ongoing consolidation, and the qu...

In this episode, Pål and Ville sit down with Markus Niemi-Nikkola, Chief Procurement Officer at Savings Bank and quickly realise that procurement might be one of the most misunderstood (and critical) functions in banking. What starts as a conversation about sourcing and vendor management turns into a deeper look at how banks actually get things done behind the scenes: from navigating legacy system...

Another month, another set of headlines quietly orbiting the same big question: Where does AI actually change the game and where does it just sit on top of old problems? In this Nordic Fintech Highlights episode, Ville, Pål and Janne connect three very different stories through a familiar thread: automation is moving fast, but reality is still catching up. On the agenda: Janne: Lunar x Wolt. Banki...

In this episode, Pål and Ville sit down with Joonas Tomperi, CEO and co-founder of Enable Banking — and quickly realise this is less about APIs and more about mindset. Yes, we talk open banking. Yes, PSD2 makes an appearance. But the real story is what it takes to build a fintech in a heavily regulated industry when half the market says “you’re too late” and the other half says “nothing works yet....

January may have looked quiet on the surface, but the Nordic fintech engine was very much running. In this Nordic Fintech Highlights episode, Ville, Pål and Janne unpack what actually mattered beneath the seasonal slowdown — where peer-to-peer payments, SME banking, and the future of merchant acquiring all collide in very Nordic ways. On the agenda: .- Klarna goes P2P. From BNPL to bank to sending...

We’re back in central-bank territory with Aleksi Grym from the Bank of Finland, and once again manage to turn a perfectly sensible conversation into a deep dive on money, payments, and why nothing in this space is ever as straightforward as it sounds. Starting with what central banks actually do (spoiler: more than just printing money), we move into crypto, stablecoins, and why most of their real-...