Helsinki Fintech Farm

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Helsinki
Helsinki Fintech Farm

Scaling innovation and growth in financial services. Fintech Farm is a financial technology hub and Fintech Farm Ltd.

Fintech Farm provides innovation, consulting, acceleration, matchmaking, and training services for the financial industry. is privately held and has built a vibrant community of 100 financial industry organizations within the last 4 years.

04/09/2026

Pauli Kariniemi from the Ministry of Finance is the new Helsinki Fintech Open champion.

He beat last year's winner Kaj Keinänen from Santander in the final, and got the perpetual trophy from him right after. The tournament was played in the usual 2 vs 2 Americano format, but the final was played one on one. That was the right call. Kariniemi and Keinänen settled it in front of everyone else.

Sixteen players and around sixty people in total. Banks, fintechs, authorities and service providers, from around Finland and even from Malta.
The venue was again the Bank of Finland's estate in Ramsinniemi. Two clay courts, the sea next to them, and a sunny day in early September. This was already the sixth event with the Bank of Finland and the fourth tennis tournament.

The persistence award was given out for the second time. It went to Tuomas Autero, who has been there every year and has now played under three different company names. That says something about this industry. Same prize as last year, a Patagonia vest with the Fintech Open logo. At this point it is basically the uniform of Nordic finance.

Then sauna and swimming. Sea at 17 degrees, which was this summer's default temperature. People went in anyway. A lot of the best talk happened after the last point was played.

That is really the point of the day. There are not many times in the year when bankers, fintech people, regulators and vendors spend a whole day together with no stage and no slides.

Thanks to the Bank of Finland for hosting again.
Who takes the trophy in 2027?

02/09/2026

One Nordic bank mentions pensions 43 times in the strategic report section of its 2025 annual report.

We counted because we read the annual reports and strategic outlooks of 15 Nordic and Baltic banks, cover to cover, to build this year's agenda. When a word appears that often in the part of the report where a bank explains itself, it is not a theme. It is a strategy.

Nordic populations are ageing, deposits are moving into markets, and net interest income is normalising after an unusually good run. The answer every large Nordic bank has reached is the same: fee income from savings, investments and pensions.

The moves are already public. Partnerships with the largest global asset managers. A fund investment given to every newborn in one country. Record numbers of new systematic investing agreements. An EU Savings and Investments Union sitting on top as the policy tailwind.

The household balance sheet is the growth battleground for the next decade, and it is under-programmed at almost every banking event. Not at ours.

Nordic Banking Forum, 26 November, Helsinki. nordicbankingforum .com

Who wins Nordic household wealth in ten years, the banks or the platforms?

19/08/2026

Revolut has applied to open a bank branch in Finland. 🚀🇫🇮

For the 250,000+ Finnish customers this would mean local FI account numbers, and everyday banking that actually works for salary payments and bills. It is a branch of the Lithuanian Revolut Bank, so no counters and no in-person service. The rest of it is real: local hiring, closer cooperation with Finnish authorities, and work on things like identification and regulatory reporting.

Worth noting who is running it. Francesco Aghemio joined Revolut in 2022 and built the licensed branches in Belgium and the Netherlands from the ground up, to 1 million and 1.5 million customers. Finland is the same playbook, one market later. He now oversees Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and before Revolut he led Wise's European licensed entity.

So when he says the goal is to become the primary bank, he has done the branch part twice already.

Francesco is on stage at Nordic Banking Forum on 26 November in Helsinki. Good timing.

Join us at nordicbankingforum .com

18/08/2026

Core banking renewal has not been much of a public topic in recent years. The work has been going on, but it is a long, heavy programme, and not the kind of thing banks are eager to talk about while it is still in progress. Now the topic is back on the surface. Last week we hosted a full house for the launch of Pål Krogdahl's book Rip Out the Core.

The most useful argument of the evening was also the least popular one with consultants. The standard approach is to start a transformation by analysing your legacy, usually as a long and expensive project of its own. Pål's point is that this gets the order wrong. Define where the bank is going, define the business capabilities you need, and only then look at the legacy to see what is still worth keeping. Start from the legacy and you end up defining your future from your current constraints, with the people who built those constraints in the room.

The panel's second point went against the mood of most AI discussions right now. Use AI around the core, not in it. When the number is three euros, it has to be three euros every time, and a non-deterministic system is a strange place to put your ledger. Shrink the core, keep it deterministic, and put the AI where it actually helps.

One more thing worth repeating: the barrier is rarely the technology. It is people saying customers don't want that, without having asked them.

Thanks to Pål for the book, Ville for moderating, and to Aura Cloud and Pismo for making the evening happen.

14/08/2026

DNB has gone live on nCino for corporate lending, with SME lending planned next year.
Norway's largest bank, more than 200 000 corporate clients, and a rollout continuing across branches in nine countries. Deloitte handled the implementation.

Two things worth noticing here.
First, the sequencing. Large corporate lending first, SME second. That is the opposite of how these programs are often scoped, and it says something about where the pain and the value actually sit in credit modernisation.

Second, DNB is also deploying nCino's Banking Advisor, an AI interface built into banker workflows. Which brings the real question for the rest of the Nordic market: how much of a credit process are banks ready to hand over, and where does the human stay?

Core credit system replacement is on a lot of Nordic roadmaps right now. This is one of the first large Nordic references to actually go live.

More Nordic fintech and banking signals: nordicfintechhighlights com

11/08/2026

Back to work: practical AI and a rooftop full of Digital Banking PROs

We opened the H2 season at Reaktor with finance leaders looking at what it actually takes to move AI from pilots and slideware into something that changes how a bank, an asset manager or an insurer works.

Mikael Kopteff (Reaktor) on why most organisations can run pilots, but far fewer get past the wall to scaling. Organisational maturity and the courage to rethink the business decide who does.

Aleksi Manninen (Reaktor) on how AI has reshaped the design and development workflow at Yle. Hands off, minds on.

Janne Salminen (OP Pohjola) with the view from inside a bank. Scaling AI is a governance and organisational question before it is a technology one.

Full house, and a focused one. Plenty of questions and open discussion, including between banks that compete with each other every other day of the week. That is usually the sign of a topic people are actually working on right now.

Thanks to Reaktor for hosting, and to everyone who joined. Breakfast, barista ice coffee and a view over the Helsinki rooftops did not hurt either.

More of these are coming through Digital Banking Academy.

27/07/2026

Back to business in August. Straight to the core.

We are kicking off the latter part of the year by hosting the Helsinki launch of Rip Out the Core: A DIY Guide to Platform-Enabled Banking Transformation, the new book by Pål Krogdahl.

Banks know they cannot keep patching legacy systems forever. But ripping everything out and starting again is rarely an option either.

So how can banks modernise step by step, capability by capability, without bringing the whole structure down?

Join us for an informal evening with a fireside chat, honest discussion, networking and a book signing.

📅 Thursday, 13 August 2026
⏰ 16:30–19:00
📍 Maria 01, Helsinki

Every participant will also receive a copy of the book, thanks to Aura Cloud.
The event is hosted by Digital Banking Academy, Fintech Farm and Pismo, part of Visa.

Places are limited, so register early:
https://hubs.ly/Q04qNQR60

17/07/2026

"The robots are taking over," and agentic commerce was the trend of the season.

In the Season 13 finale we wrap up the trends of the last half year with Fintech Daydreaming and Nordic Fintech Highlights. Ville Sointu breaks down Nordea and Mastercard running the first real, live agentic card payment in the Nordics, and where agentic payments go next.

The season's other big threads: the digital euro, public vs private money, tech sovereignty, and, once again, AI.

Tune in for the full wrap-up with Pål Krogdahl, Ville Sointu and Janne Salminen from Helsinki Fintech Farm. Plus Pål's book Rip Out the Core, launching 13 August at Maria 01, a former hospital, fitting for a night about operating on legacy core systems, and a genuinely terrible summer IT joke from Janne.

Watch or listen:
YouTube: https://hubs.ly/Q04pRKbc0
Spotify: https://hubs.ly/Q04pRRMQ0
Apple: https://hubs.ly/Q04pRKMN0

26/06/2026

Last week Revolut appointed a new Head of Northern Europe. The numbers behind it tell the real story.

The Nordics are now home to more than two million Revolut customers, up over 120 percent since the end of 2023, with a target of three million by the end of 2026. That is more than one in ten people in the region.

The person now leading that push is Francesco Aghemio. He spent the last three and a half years building Revolut's Benelux business from the ground up, and now takes that playbook north, with a country manager in every Nordic market and a clear ambition to become the bank people actually use, not the second card in the drawer.

That is exactly why we wanted him on stage. Francesco joins us at Nordic Banking Forum on 26 November in Helsinki, one of the speakers we are most looking forward to.

P.S. Hatching Bird tickets are available now. Price goes up after the weekend.

24/06/2026

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its most powerful publicly available model. Three days later a US government security directive forced it to shut down worldwide on national security grounds. The first time a government has pulled a commercial AI off the market. That is new territory.

Same pattern as the one keeping bank security teams awake: quantum computing edging closer to the encryption behind every payment and every account. One outruns the rulebook, the other the cryptography. Both are arriving faster than anyone is ready for.

This is exactly the territory our Risk & Resilience landscape was built for, and why Jan Goetz, CEO of IQM Quantum Computers, is part of the conversation on 26 November.

The technology is outrunning the rulebook. That is the heart of this year's theme.

Nordic Banking Forum, Helsinki, 26 November. https://hubs.ly/Q04ms6Nh0

Osoite

LapinlahdenKatu 16
Helsinki
00180

Nettisivu

https://www.helsinkifintech.fi/

Hälytykset

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