The Fintech Talents team, along with our partners at Marqeta, set off on an epic road trip to explore growing European fintech hubs. Three cities in one week – Paris, Stockholm and Berlin – yielded fantastic insight and the opportunity to speak to leading innovators along the way.
During the Stockholm stop of the Fintech Talents Road Trip, Vesa Riihimäki, Head of Startup & Growth Business at Nordea Finland, shared insights into what he has been working on and what it is VCs are looking for.
Vesa has been with Nordea for over 11 years which has led him to work alongside some of the 5000 startups and scalable late-stage companies that are customers of the bank, thanks to one of their core values being to support startup and growth companies by granting loans that traditional banks wouldn’t tend to offer because of the risks implicated.
Although Vesa may have previously stated that the road ahead for fintech is declining compared to other sectors, he has retracted this opinion as he now sees that that long term fintech will remain as an interesting investment target as a sector. He observes that relatively low burn but high growth fintech’s are getting the equity, receiving the growth loans and going on to win for the sector.
Nordea is the largest financial services group in the Nordic region and one of the biggest banks in Europe.
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