Nordic Fintech Magazine

Correspondent banking has always been a quiet toll booth. You want to reach Riksbank’s settlement systems? Fine — but you’ll pay a partner bank for the privilege, accept their liquidity terms, and hope their operational priorities align with yours. For Swedish challenger bank Bankaktiebolaget Nordiska, that arrangement is now over. Nordiska has selected Finastra’s Swift […]

Estonia has 10 unicorns and 1.3 million people. The government’s new research, picked up by Fintech News Baltic, translates that into 7.14 unicorns per million residents, second on earth behind Liechtenstein. The number travels well on LinkedIn. It belongs on a ministerial slide deck. It also obscures more than it reveals, and Nordic and Baltic […]

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Apple spent eleven years building its own financial infrastructure, then handed the keys to a Swedish fintech founded twenty years ago. That contradiction is where this story begins. On July 28, Apple launches Apple Upgrade in the US: 36-month device leases covering iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches, with monthly payments and a buyout option. […]

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The Baltic banking market has operated on a simple, durable logic for three decades: Nordic giants own it, Nordic giants run it, and anyone else waits in line. Swedbank and SEB together hold roughly half the deposit and lending market across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. That logic just met its first serious structural challenge, and […]

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PSD2 was supposed to open European banking to competition. What it mostly opened was a decade-long procurement cycle for compliance consultants. Now Parliament and Council negotiators have sealed a deal on PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation — the biggest overhaul of EU payment rules since PSD2 — and the official announcements are radiating optimism. […]

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