Live from Nordic Banking Forum 2025

A Full House of Bank CEOs (and One Central Banker)

We took Fintech Daydreaming on the road to the Nordic Banking Forum in Helsinki, and somehow ended up interviewing more CEOs in one day than we usually see in a year.

In this special episode, Pål, Ville — and Janne, once we caught him mid–event sprint — sat down with:

.-Prag Sharma (Citi) on agentic AI, future-of-finance vibes, and why 80–90% of bank data suddenly matters.

.-Janne Salminen (Helsinki Fintech Farm) pops in for a quick Nordic Fintech Highlights segment and shares the annual event-planner panic cycle with us.

.- Sampsa Laine (Alisa Bank) on SME banking, partner ecosystems, and why mortgages are still a “not yet.”

.-Riikka Laine-Tolonen (S-Bank) on running a bank inside a retail empire, loyalty economics, and scaling to 3.4M customers.

.-Jarkko Mäensivu (Saldo Bank) on embedded finance, European expansion, and building a lean, credit-focused bank.

.-Aleksi Grym (Bank of Finland) on fraud in instant payments, CBDCs, and why Finland quietly invented half this stuff in the ’90s (and already shut it all down long time ago). Been there. Got the t-shirt. Wrote an excellent paper about it.

With Citi, Alisa, S-Bank, Saldo Bank, and the actual central bank represented — plus Janne’s news segment — this turned into perhaps the most executive-heavy episode we’ve ever recorded.

We celebrated:

Zero vendor interference

Zero stablecoin panels

A rare concentration of bank CEOs voluntarily talking to us

And the survival of an entire live recording day with minimal technical disasters (backdrop changes don’t count)

And yes, we ended with a fintech dad joke. Naturally.

Episode hosted by Pål Krogdahl & Ville Sointu

Episode produced and edited by Fintech Daydreaming

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- Pål Krogdahl - https://www.linkedin.com/in/krogdahl/

- Ville Sointu - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ville-sointu-54682b/