August in Nordic fintech felt like a Christopher Nolan script: confusing, overlong, occasionally brilliant. Coop Norge’s core banking migration, Visma’s latest acquisitions, and Swedbank buying out Barclays in Entercard all unfolded like plot points you only understand after the credits roll.
We argue about whether it was the quietest fintech month of the year, make questionable jokes about beef stroganoff, and somehow get lost in a time loop about Copenhagen.
And here’s the twist: read this description backwards and it still makes sense.
Because in August, Nordic fintech really did move forward and backward at the same time — and no one was entirely sure what just happened.
Episode hosted by Pål Krogdahl & Ville Sointu & Janne Salminen
Episode produced and edited by Fintech Daydreaming
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Welcome to Fintech Daydreaming, [Music] the podcast that dives into the world of banking technologies and the everanging landscape of fintech companies. We bring you real life examples from global and local thought leaders as well as experts working within the financial industry and seek out the best stories from the front lines of financial services innovation where dreams of industry pioneers meet reality. Hosted by Paul Crogdal and Vinless Sonu. This is Fintech Daydreaming. Hello and welcome back to Fintech Daydreaming. We are here with another episode of Nordic Fintech Highlights. My name is Vanto. I will be your host uh for today’s episode and as always, I’m joined with by my good friend and co-host Paul. So Paul, how are you today? I’m I as always I’m good, Villa. I I think we need to find some new way of having this intro section because we always keep saying this I am Paul or I am Villa and I can’t do this alone so I’m here with my co-host Paul or Villa. We need to find a new way of doing it. I think but I don’t think so. I I I people like consistency right? So you need to have this kind of familiar sounding thing in the beginning to make you feel comfortable and uh for anybody who’s listening to us for the first time they might want to hear our names. So, I think there’s like a tradition with that with the intro stuff. So, um let’s talk about it at least. But that aside, no, I I’m good. I am feeling that uh summer is slowly coming to an end here in Finland. Um but apart from that, the sun is shining. It was uh pouring with rain this morning and there was a full-on thunderstorm when I woke up. So, it’s nice to have the sunshine back and a little bit of heat and and feeling good and relaxed and for us to sit down and talk about fintech and all the interesting things. And talking about fintech, we should also point out for everybody that uh we are heading towards Copenhagen. But unfortunately, by the time this is published, we will already be in Copenhagen. So, I hope all of you enjoyed the time with us in Copenhagen now that this has been published. but before we recorded it. You get you get what I mean? So, there’s a time jump for you, but Okay, good. So, hello to us in the future and us in the past. I don’t know how this works anymore, but okay, good. Uh, let’s uh let’s move along and uh bring our of course our other uh co-host into the conversation as well. So, Yan, how are things there at Helsinki Fintech Farm? things were regular but now I got this kind of Christopher Nolan kind of vibe that which day I’m actually in right now. So got a bit confused but other otherwise I’m good. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And indeed we are going to the uh the what was it the Nordic fintech week uh in Copenhagen and or we have gone. Okay. This is going to be a recurring theme for this episode I think. But the uh the uh and yeah it was fun. It’s going to be fun. But anyway, the uh we made we did make this comparison that the out of the Nordic uh fintech festivals, I mean Yan, of course, you’re the one working with the with the Fintech Summit uh in Helsinki. Uh the one in Copenhagen actually has the nicest venue. So, what do you have to say to that? Yeah, venue and venue. But then if if you take our weather and and and that stuff, so I think it’s quite hard to beat that. Okay, fair enough. We we we tried to start this be fair. We’ll see. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good. Uh but hey, let’s uh let’s start with the conversation. I guess people want to hear a little bit about fintech topics as well before before they get their heads a little more confused with the with the time jump. So um uh let’s let’s start with the uh overview uh from you. So how was August uh in the Nordic fintex scene? Well, so while after July, we were quite surprised that hey, uh didn’t anyone get the memo that it’s it’s summer holidays and it was it was extremely busy in July. So now apparently everyone took their time off in August because it was really really quiet month. Uh I don’t think it’s anything to be worried about. It’s it’s it’s usual that actually August is is a bit more more quiet. But yeah, there was a funding record uh zero funding rounds in in August. That was that was truly a new new thing. But yeah, there was still things happening. So Visma acquired two more companies. Uh we’ll get into that bit later. And also Swed Bank Swed Bank uh got uh Barclay sting enter card. Uh otherwise in Sweden again uh company called Borgo acquired Hippotech. It’s uh technical mortgage platform with an option to expand expand to their full customer base and then on the ESG side a company called position green they bought a Norwegian carbon management startup Morris scope. So uh quite many things on the MFA market. Then also on the banking neo banking side uh PO uh is partnering with lemon markets uh from Germany to launch investment accounts to German business customers which is uh something I haven’t really seen much actually in the in the kind of theme neo banking space but that’s that’s very interesting as well. It is an interesting contrast indeed into July because we were talking about the uh the fact that the Nordic fintech never sleeps not even during the summer month of July which is usually the month when where nothing ever happens in the Nordics. Uh and now we get this complete freeze. So are people are doing their summer vacations later or I mean again it’s uh anybody’s guess I suppose but I was personally surprised when I looked at the newsletter. I was like, you know, did I get the like half the letter? Because it’s usually it’s like I have a very difficult time choosing which story to cover in in these news episodes we do. But this time I was actually looking at, you know, is there anything interesting here? So, uh, how does actually compare to last year’s August? Do you remember? Yeah, I just checked. Last year was uh I I guess August was last year also the most quiet month of the year, but still it was maybe 50 or even 100% more news in August. So yeah, it was it was quite a contrast, but kind of still following some kind of pattern. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next couple of months. So I I’m really hoping this isn’t the start of a new trend that’s going to show a downward spiral driven by financial uncertainty. And Geop I think already this at this point of of September there’s been happening happening quite a quite a many things. So I agree. I agree. Yeah. Did you guys by the way start trading with the CLE stock last week or when was it? Uh I did get a a very small amount just for for the principle of having a little but uh but yeah not really. Now how about you Paul? I generally tend to keep my investment portfolio to myself. So um I’m not going to share whether I have uh bought any shares or not. I’ll keep that to myself or uh or uh within a circle of close friends. Definitely not on the internet like this. All right. All right. That’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. Uh I do believe when you get a tiny fraction like I did just for out of out of curiosity, I think it’s okay to say that. But I I would agree with you. It would be a larger portion. I would definitely say I have no idea what you’re talking about. So anyway, so uh good. Uh let’s uh let’s get on with the with the show, so to say. And of course, the next thing that we have to get off the off the u off our chest right now is the usual joke. Uh as usual, Yan, it’s your honors to to do the joke for a new episode. So, what do you have in store for us today? Yes. So, um why can’t you use the word beef stew as your computer or online bank password? I I really dread knowing the answer to this, but yeah, please. It’s not strong enough. Oh no. Oh no. We we we keep on delivering strong results on the joke front. I can I can say that. U not really meaning it right. But okay, good. Good. Thank you for that. Um I mean meat stews are very hearty food. Good for the September time I believe considering the weather. So I think uh I think we’re we’re on the right track here at least. Yeah, it looks like Paul almost fell out of his chair because of this joke. So, uh hopefully he’s okay. I I laughed I laughed my Apple ear pod straight out of my ear. So, yes, that was very good. Thank you, uh Jana. Yes, thank you very much. I I have to admit I do like a good Strogenoff actually. Indeed. Indeed, especially if you had like stew in a good do. But okay, but dude, enough about stroganovs. Let’s uh let’s get on get on with the show to the actual content which everybody is expecting us to deliver here and that’s the news. So uh we are going to cover one one news article each as always and we this time we’re going to start with you Paul. So which one did you pick out of the few we saw in the list this month? Yeah, I have to admit that just as you said, Villa, very often I look at the the newsletter that you send out once a month, Yana, and go, “O, there’s so much good stuff here. I wish I could talk about half of it.” This time I looked down the list and went. So, um, nothing really grabbed my attention, but there was one that I thought was interesting because we have spoken quite a lot in the past around the need for banks to modernize their environments to do core transformations uh, and those sort of things. But we’ve seen a general decline, I would say, in banks doing a single vendor big bang transformation. I think the last one that that I have on my radar are still trying to do it and it’s one of the Nordic banks and we we just won’t say anything. Actually, I lie. There is two Nordic banks, one Finnish bank, one Nordic bank. I’m not going to mention any of them now. If you listen to us enough, you know exactly who we’re talking about, but I was intrigued to see that um a small um actually they’re not that small, are they? uh K Noa, who is actually more of a a um uh retail outlet. They’re a cooperative um focusing on retail, but being a cooperative, they also have a a membership system, fairly similar to a lot of the the retail outlets do these days. And being a co-op, you pay yourself in to become a member of the co-op. And therefore the uh corpora have got um a core banking system a legacy core banking system and they’ve just um signed an agreement with Mamboo to do a modernization. So they’re going to be doing a if I remember correctly it was a fiveyear project to migrate onto the Mamboo platform. uh they’ve enlisted a Nordic um company called Know It to be the system integrators. Um I believe Know I is is out of Norway uh with some offices across Finland and um and Sweden. Um I had to look into the the news article a little bit carefully because know it are also a a software provider. So they’ve got um a a whole offering that plugs into Mamboo. So I was trying to figure out if know it were just delivering the capabilities for the integration or whether they were going to be the system integrator as well. But from what I can see their predominant role is to be the system integrator to implement Mamboo for coupe So I think this is this is good. It’s interesting. It’s it’s nice again to see some banks moving in this modernization journey. Maybe this is the start of a a returning trend. Um again what I think is interesting is is seeing someone go for a single vendor strategy where you know most these days we’re talking about uh multicore or core less and and an ecosystem of providers but then at the same time corp is they’re not one of the large banks in the Nordic they are just running a banking capability for their retail outlet um members. So that’s um that’s that’s the one that I found that I thought was most interesting. Yeah, it is. And it’s it does feel like a bit of a deja vu. I mean, we have really haven’t seen these kind of core migration things happening uh for a while now, at least here in the Nordics. I think in Norway there’s actually been a bit bit more action still. It’s it’s not that bad curse were there as it’s maybe in Finland. But yeah, could be. And uh but yeah, that’s I mean hasn’t at least it hasn’t caught my eye and maybe it’s just because my bias of sitting here in Finland like you said, but uh yeah, it’s been a it’s been interesting to see that this this kind of well maybe it popped up because we didn’t have too many news articles in the uh uh to begin with for August, but but again it’s fun to see familiar names here. So first of all the the cooperative the uh cooperative structure of uh of coupe uh Noria here is is interesting because they have 2.3 million uh members in their membership program and as as far as I’ve understood from the news article is that each and every one of these are basically will automatically get an account. So even if it’s not your primary bank but then then again you do have 2.3 million plus accounts to migrate uh no matter what and uh this makes me think that most of these things that are coup is serving here in terms of banking are fairly simple and in those cases uh providers like mamboo can actually be a great choice because again if if it’s a very simple thing that you have to move you don’t have any complicated uh products or any complicated service portfolios to basically migrate into the new new platform. It could be fairly straightforward and risk lowrisk activity in the end which is not not the given of course for for core banking. Yes, Paul, it looks like you have an opinion. No. Yeah, I I do because one of the things that caught me with with this uh news item, both good and bad, is that it was it’s mamboo, right? So if we if you look at at the the catchment area for Mamboo, they’re very strong in certain parts of the world. They’re not very strong in the Nordics. They haven’t got a lot of uh installments in the Nordics. And secondly, there is a a growing flower of number of of cloud native core banking providers in the Nordics. You’ve got you’ve got Tomb admittedly as they’re they’re in in the Baltics. Um you’ve you’ve got outer cloud uh as another example. So and yeah you even have the large tier every banking platform in in Norway that’s that’s running there. So it was it was for me it was refreshing to to see Mamboo in the headlights again and especially being here in the Nordics. So that that was that was an interesting one that it was Mamboo rather than one of the local plays. H so Janna any opinions views on this? Yeah, definitely. Like I mentioned, I I guess there has been a few more more of this core banking news this year from Norway. Theto every obviously a big more traditional player closing a few deals and now I think this was perhaps already second deal uh for Mambu from Norway this year. But yeah, I think generally this core banking renewal thing, it was something that 10 years ago banks were proud to announce it. uh but now they they rather keep quiet about the this kind of stuff because it’s it’s quite much associated with with excessive costs and and service interruptions and and management hair loss. So it’s it’s it’s something that that uh obviously many companies still have to do but but uh how is it like all at once or or or are they trying to do it kind of piece by piece? But but definitely like uh interesting to see this new kind of fintech era uh SAS kind of providers also in the equation with with traditional banks. Yeah. And at least they’re doing a good job managing the expectations. the uh the news said that they are saying that it’s going to take between four to eight years. So that’s quite that’s realistic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s realistic and it’s also very safe because you have like a four-year buffer uh there. Yeah. Built in. So I I would guess that maybe their current project plans is plan is somewhere between two and three years and then the build safety buffers on top of that. Uh we’ll see. Of course the length of the project is also going to determine how much it will cost. Yes Paul. Yeah. four to eight years is going to push them past the point of diminishing returns as well. So it’ll be interesting to see how that project plays out and how much flexibility they will be able to put into the journey as they progress to those if it is 8 years I think that’s a very very very long time to be looking at it but you know maybe I could take the opportunity here as well Villa to uh to highlight that I’ve actually got a book that’s coming out early next year I’m writing on this I’m writing about how to do a progressive modernization but to do it in a very different way and to reduce risk can increased uh the time to market and time to value. So this this is very interesting to me and I think saying they’re going to do it over eight years I’ve get perplexed but um I’ll have a book all about this coming out next year. So wow. So coupe said it’s going to take four to eight years to do that migration and now you put yourself in into a deadline that they actually have to deliver the book next year. So uh actually it’s it was the publishers that have put me on the deadline. I I need to deliver the finished manuscript early next year and then they’ll go through the process. So sometime in the middle of next year, my book will be out. Yes. All right. Good. I guess there are some core core bank projects that are having kind of their 10 year anniversary right now or so on. We just agreed that we’re not going to talk about that. I didn’t mention any companies here. There we go. There we go. Good. But uh that gives me a good uh segue to move over to you Jan. So which uh news article did you choose uh this month? Yes. So I took the Visma news. Um so Visma as we know it’s a Norwegian software warehouse. Um the article said that they actually have more than 350 uh acquisitions in total and only only this year there’s been 10. And now uh recently they acquired two accounting related AI firms from the German speaking market in Europe. So uh Millia.io that’s an AI powered platform for accounting firms uh that automates and and standardize the internal workflows basically between the accountant and and the customer. Sounds quite quite smart. And then also a taxi taxi.io IO which is as well an AI powered uh solution but that’s more like a tax advisor which is used by more than500 tax firms and tax departments across Germany and both of these companies are uh quite small I checked maybe 10 20 people so quite early stage startups obviously uh utilizing the latest AI technologies and now they’re being acquired and and of course here the question is Visma has a very strong track record of of of buying buying companies and kind of uh maybe bit more loosely integrating them to their their business and and and portfolio and it seems to work. But in general um there’s always like a question is why why are big companies acquiring smaller ones? Are they actually making use out of the technology or are they just trying to kill competitors? And also from the startup perspective is is it is it the smart way to actually sell in an early stage? I understand many many industries uh are are are kind of have the characteristic that if you want to succeed you actually want you need need some muscle and you need customer base and so on. So sometimes it makes sense but but there are also many things that could actually kill kill the entire company which was acquired. So how do you guys see see this this kind of M&A game going on between the startups and bigger bigger corporations? It’s uh from my perspective it’s again predictable move. It seems like in different regions again Visma being very present of course here in the Nordics uh in the accounting space uh in general it’s it’s all about who gets to keep the the uh the customer interface. So it’s it’s kind of a platform play and the more services the better services the more you’re able to have on your platform then that should be better for you because you you will become the the one place you go to to handle your daily needs in that business gives you a lot of of course as we have discussed in many of our platform episodes the it gives you the benefit of being able to upsell and get more data from from the customers. So this is about uh basically I think hedging their uh their bets and making sure that they are the one competitive interface not only in the services that they provide but continuing to provide a broader portfolio of services that that they would people would or the customers would never have to leave the Visma Visma site from from the bank’s perspective. This is interesting because again there we’ve also talked a lot about uh from banks uh uh ambitions to provide embedded finance services. So Visma would be one of the platforms where they would embed services into or banking services or uh into their platform as well. This brings the question what is uh the bank’s embedded finance strategy in general. Are you happy uh by letting your customers be in other interfaces on other platforms using your services or are you using that as a way to drive more loyalty to your own channels as a bank uh by pulling these customers away uh from these other platforms and and so forth and so forth. So again, it’s going to be an interesting play. I think what’s happening now is a lot of consolidation in order to secure these quote unquote eyeballs uh on your own channels uh and then seeing how to play play in this space. The other element you mentioned as well is interesting and which is the uh the fact that as a as the other side of this transaction are you as a small company are you better to compete or basically to uh be part of something bigger uh and kind of get your well-earned uh profits from your small company uh by being part of something bigger but uh Paul what are your uh thoughts well start start in reverse from what you you ended with, isn’t it generally the wish of every founder that whatever they create gets purchased because that puts cash in their pocket. So irrespective of what phase you’re in, you you walk away with a large sum of money in your pocket and if you’re lucky and they don’t just swallow up the company and rip it apart, you have a job for a little while as well. So you you get the best of both worlds. So from the the small fintech side, I can I can see this fantastic. is great. Um, from Vizma’s side, um, they’ve bought two companies in Germany, early stage companies in Germany. Have they done that with a focus on the German market or have they done that with an intention to bring those capabilities into their existing market which plays a little bit into what you were saying Villa? Are they doing this to try and gain footprint in a new market or or strengthen in a a relatively new market or are they looking at this to to quickly be able to bring new capabilities and embed new um services into their existing uh platform and and offerings. So I don’t I don’t know Jana if if I have to be honest and say that I didn’t look at the news article in great detail but do you have any view on the strategic intent as to whether they’re doing this to gain more in Germany or to bring that in to to the Nordic? Uh actually no there wasn’t wasn’t any like uh kind of details details on that perspective. Of course I think quite often when it comes to accounting and and tax that’s fairly uh local local stuff but then of course the technology is is always scalable. You just need to change the parameters. Definitely. Yeah, I wish it was that simple uh in everything, but the um I’m sure it’s actually not here as well, but I think what again it’s a good point. The um they’re probably they wanted more local expertise as well. So that was what another part of the equation. Uh on and then on the other hand using that expertise to roll out new features in other countries as well. uh coming back to the question about the broadening your service portfolio or enhancing your services in order in order to be a more attractive platform in general but yeah you were saying Paul that was just what you just said there Jana is actually very correct tax tends to be very local there there are some taxation rules that are fairly similar across Europe but tax is a very very local geographical thing so if if the solutions that they have picked up from from Germany is very German ccentric towards the German taxation rules then bringing that into to Norway or or the Nordics could actually be a big piece of work. So I’m wondering like you said both of them are AI based so it might be the AI capabilities that are more interesting than anything else. Indeed the uh and uh interesting to see in the future we’ll probably learn whether the timing of of this acquisition was right and for whom. Uh interestingly enough there’s just this week we heard about the news of the very famous uh startup vintage startup curve uh getting a fairly low valuation by when being bought out by Lloyds Bank. Uh so again something uh it was it was a unicorn at some point in time. I think it was valued like two two or three billion. uh now the transaction m amount was much lower than that. I think it was uh 100 plus million instead of billions. So u so again uh is this going to be another curve story or is it going to be the exact right time to join a big company and make it fly? We we will of course uh see how it evolves. Good. Uh any last words on the uh Visma news before we move on? Nope. Nothing from me. All right. Good. Let’s move on to the uh third story and indeed the last story of uh of this week’s episode and that is uh coming from Sweden. Uh Swedish bank sweatbank as we all know uh very well uh has decided to buy out Barclay Banks Barclay’s Bank’s stake on Enter. Uh so Enterc uh is a card company in Sweden and they are they are they issue their own cards but they also provide services to other financial institution to run their institution to run their card programs and um this setup between Swedbank and Barclays was uh was originally founded uh in 2005 uh when they decided that building this joint venture for this common capability to to do cards in the Nordics was a good idea. basically spinning it out uh from the bank or out and and then outsourcing your cards cards programs into into an external entity uh and then uh running it together. Now Barclays has decided to uh as part of their portfolio strategy in general was to exit this position and now it’s it’s fully owned uh by sweat bank as far as I understood or at least very large majority of entertainers owned by Sweatbank. Again, the reason I picked this news was uh was that the dynamics of the card business is changing a little bit now uh in the coming years in the in the Nordic countries. And this these kind of structural changes are a bit of a I would say maneuvering around preparing for those changes coming uh coming forward as well. And these changes are related to basically two different factors at the moment. uh there is the increasing uh level of crypto activity of course but we will leave that for aside for a moment. The other part is the uh increased amount of payments moving on to mobile wallet and digital wallet rails which are basic typically also linked directly into account to account rails. A lot of the u the card issuing and account holding banks uh are looking into uh how is the uh account to account going to change the market dynamics when it comes to their cards business. We actually had a very interesting discussion about this as well uh as part of our working group our expert group in moi forum but uh and that’s why I also found this news to be quite interesting and the um and the reason why it’s interesting especially from a bank perspective is that cards business is a very good business if you are if you’re a bank who is doing the issuing of the cards because whenever somebody uses your card whether there’s a debit card or a credit card on either uh you know on one of the large uh card schemes uh then you as the account holding institution or the guy the card issuing institution will get an interchange fee. Now when you get that fee of course then you are happy it’s it’s a nice position to be in and whenever there is a new mobile wallet for example coming in and and saying that they want to do account to account typically these account to account transactions are very very cheap or at least very low fee uh or almost free compared to the interchange that uh the banks get from the uh from the card schemes. This disincentivizes the the banks to actually do anything in the account to account space. And that’s why we are uh in a in a world where uh the u many of the banks are looking into positions to moving closer to the wallets and also optimizing the in the their setups when it comes to both issuing and acquiring of payment of payment instruments both on account to account and card rails. So while there is no explicit connection in this piece of news about uh Swedbank’s uh thoughts around the possible decline of card revenues, uh I think it’s a uh it’s an interesting well thing to follow as well because these legal structures and joint ventures are definitely one way that you can make your moves in the uh in the world where uh the card revenues are more uh under pressure I would say. Uh but Paul, I mean when you look at the card market in general and the the kind of legal structures built around the cards uh here in the Nordics, uh does this uh does this piece of news tinker your Spidey senses in any way? I I was actually thinking about something slightly different. Although yes, as you very elegantly laid out the whole world of cards and the impact it has on the banks and the issues issuers and everything else. Um there there is a larger trend that I’ve seen maybe over the last I would even say you know years and that is large banks divesting their out of core market businesses right we’ve seen it with hundin here in the Nordics saying we’re going to stop our business in in Finland and move out of Finland and focus more on our domestic market. I’m wondering whether this was driven by Barkley saying we want to pull our focus back and therefore we will divest areas that we don’t see as being potential high growth for us in the future. I mean what else business does Barclays have as as anything substantial in the Nordics? So why maintain this little satellite island? Yes, let go of it. And and I think that’s if you asked me and I could be very wrong here and someone from Barclays or Sweatbank might come and bunk us over the head here, but I think this this was just a simple cost cutting exercise for uh for Barclays for Barclays I would say yes. I mean 20 years is a long time so that’s when they started. So uh for all we know Barclays had very different plans for the for this market uh when they when they entered this JV and uh those might have changed. In the press release they say it’s part of their capital light strategy which also is a continuation of their earlier divestments uh in other uh companies something called Brookfield Asset Management for example they have divested uh as well. So again uh the story makes sense from that perspective. What would have been interesting to go back a little bit in time and feel think that what has changed in since 2005 other than this uh moving on to a capital light approach was there perhaps other plants in the Nordics. But anyway, that’s a story that we will never hear. I would I would presume although I think we can we can we can draw some parallels here as well because if we go back that amount of time in history, we’ll end up in a place where the banks were very bullish. A lot of the large banks were looking for global domination. they were trying to grow. They were very heavily looking at new markets and and figuring out how they could get footsteps into new markets. Um the banks were in in a probably what they felt was a lower risk uh environment. Things have changed an awful lot. So uh I think that’s the basics. Everybody was looking for expansion, fast expansion and global expansion. Indeed. Indeed. Well, Y, would you have a Barclays card in your pocket if they did make the uh Nordic expansion once upon a time? Well, I I’m not sure if I need any more cards because, you know, we without a doubt like cards are the space in fintech and finance which has been like growing and has been the most visible. There’s most end users whether it’s consumer or business probably most also funding gone down that drain and and of course the question is like what is the endgame here so maybe for Barclays could be a smart move to pull out of course it’s the same everywhere in the world there’s new newcomers in the market um all the time of course like in the Nordics we have more more like card payments are more common of course than we what it was 20 years ago, but still the market isn’t growing massively. So there’s just new companies coming up. So So it’s interesting to see how how we will eventually land in this entire kind of card competition and and do they expect every consumer to have 20 cards or what? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And coming back to the uh to the points I tried to make make earlier about the structures and business structures. The cards business in general has been around for such a long time like you said Yan and is so established in the Nordics. It is a good candidate for what the what we were uh we would describe as common infrastructure or shared infrastructure because it’s it’s again it’s very well established uh and the business is well known. So there are commonalities between the card programs. I mean ultimately if like you said if you look at a card from different banks today they are quite similar. There’s some small differences but as as a thing that you use or a service that you use there’s not there’s not kind of that much differentiation there. If you reflect that to the part that okay well could this be then service from a similar a similar uh service provider as well for example the answer is probably yes. So the uh I think the uh original reasons why they they kind of spun out or started this JV between Swedbach and Barkley is from Swedbach’s perspective. I maybe the idea was to create this kind of common infrastructure. Uh again I haven’t looked into entertain a very long time. So I don’t actually know uh if there if they are selling their services to other uh banks at the moment or not. But the uh u I’m I’m sure there is this kind of a multi-tenency opportunities here as well uh even moving forward even now with the full ownership uh of uh of Swedbank good but again uh considering that it was a very slow month uh in August like we talked about I think we we did find some interesting things to talk about and uh we managed to spend a lot lot of time doing it. So uh but with that being said, I think we are quite close to closing the episode. Uh Paul, did you want to mention anything uh before we uh close for this week? Yes, it was fantastic to have seen you next week in Copenhagen, which was by the time you see this. Yeah. Play play the inception or soundtrack or whatever here. Uh, but okay, I guess I enjoyed it. Find out next time. Uh, but good. Uh, Y, how about you? Which time are are you in? I I can’t decide. So, I could agree that um latest, let’s see, at the Nordic banking forum, which is in December. So, that’s at least in the future. Yeah, that we agree on. So glad we found our totem for any Lolan fans out there. Uh okay, good. So yeah, nothing more to mention before we close. Uh remember to like and subscribe, of course, both fintech farm and daydreaming. Perfect. So uh you saved me from from doing that as I as I always as I always do in the end. So again, like, subscribe, leave a comment uh and tell your friends. Uh that’s the way uh the uh we we get more listeners and we get more motivation to keep on uh pushing forward. At the moment we’re going strong uh we’re going strong because again we are doing this uh events now more and more and we’re meeting more of our fans and listeners live which we thoroughly enjoy uh with Paul. So when you see us, when you saw us, I don’t know anymore. Uh the u uh please come and say hi. Uh and maybe you can even be in the podcast itself as we do in these events. Good. I think we will close with that uh and leave the other usual things uh behind for for this moment and just complete by saying this has been fintech daydreaming. This is and we’re done. Fintech daydreaming.
Dining and Cooking