Fintech capital of the Nordics

Invest Stockholm recently published a report on the state of Stockholm’s fintech ecosystem. It paints an incredibly exciting picture of where Stockholm is and where it’s going. Across the report, you get a high level overview as well as a deep dive and thoughts from key members of the fintech scene of Sweden’s capital.

As one of the leading cities in not only Europe, but the world, to grow tech startups, Stockholm has bred a number of hugely successful businesses in fintech and beyond. This includes Klarna, Spotify, iZettle, Mojang and Skype, all of which have seen a global expansion since their Swedish beginnings.

“The city boasts the highest valued private FinTech company in Europe: Stockholm-founded giant Klarna’s raising of $1 billion USD in equity funding.”

Scrive are proud to see not only our home city and our peers called out in the report but seeing our own logo among leaders in regtech too. With all our growth over the past couple of years, from a Stockholm startup to European scale-up, we see this as yet another sign that we’re continuing on the right path. The path towards our goal of being the e-sign solution of choice for the European market.

Our work with a number of clients in highly regulated industries and markets has been a great two way street where we’ve been able to assist our customers to stay compliant but also help set the industry standard, as Scrive did with our evidence package years ago.

Scrive’s legal team works tirelessly to ensure we’re in the best position to support our customers on their compliance and security journeys, offering a product specifically built for this purpose. This comes alongside the value brought by going paperless and digital in the form of streamlined signing processes, shorter sales cycles and reduced administration time.

Seeing as you’re reading this on our blog, chances are we may be preaching to the choir here and you already know all the benefits of digitalising your business processes, including financial ones, but across the world there’s still a lot of business being conducted on paper, with not only less efficiency at play but high risks of fraud, loss and errors. 

This is part of the reason Invest Stockholm’s report is such a shining beacon of hope for the digital future as it clearly shows a growing awareness of digital trends, which will lead to a greater digital maturity in the general public, among businesses both large and small.

“Stockholm-based companies account for nearly 90% of all FinTech investment deals in Sweden and 85% in the Nordics respectively.”

Among the most eye-opening statistics in the report, showcasing the role Stockholm plays in the current fintech ecosystem, is the fact that “Stockholm-based companies account for nearly 90% of all FinTech investment deals in Sweden and 85% in the Nordics respectively.” This comes on the back of Stockholm experiencing a growth of 759% in fintech investment averages from 2015 to 2020. This puts Stockholm firmly in first place when it comes to relative growth and third in Europe on the leaderboard for total investment.

Considering this critical mass of investment centred around Stockholm, it’s easy to see why there’s a seemingly never ending supply of brilliant people that flock here with stars in their eyes and a killer startup idea up their sleeves. 

You could easily see this as a threatening environment to enter, with so much competition but it’s quite the opposite. The growing ecosystem leads to higher digital maturity which, in turn, leads to a bigger market for all the players to vie for.

If you’d like to read more about how Stockholm is among the top cities leading the charge towards a more digitally focused Europe in the future, read the full report here.