Status and trends for Norwegian Fintechs

Also:

  • 💰 Startuplab with significant investment in fintech

  • 😬 Too many meetings?

  • 🧐 GDPR killing innovation?

  • 🕷 The first NFT?

📈 Status and trends for the Norwegian Fintech sector

The Finance Sector Union of Norway has, together with Ontogeny Group, launched this year's report on the status of the Norwegian fintech market. Some of the key findings include:

  • The number of companies is growing, but few of the companies are growing large

  • Major changes in economic development: Payment services and security & compliance perform best

  • Few companies drive economic development. There are only 11 companies with 50-500 MNOK in revenue (Stacc is one of them 😉)

  • The number of blockchain companies is growing

💰 Startuplab with significant investment in fintech

The examples of Norwegian fintech companies that have managed to scale are far too few. Startuplab wants to do something about this by starting their fifth industrial program. On the team they have DNB, Microsoft, Schibsted, Sparebank1 Østlandet, Sparebank 1 SMN, the law firm SANDS and the insurance company Fremtind.

It will be interesting to see if this pans out to be something. One topic which isn't talked much about is how ownership affects the growth of fintech companies. Especially when it comes to fintechs targetting other banks. Suppose you are a young fintech startup and have a bank on your cap table: good luck getting access to a competing bank! The investment you were so happy about (and opened doors to your first customer) closed all the other doors. Luckily participation in Startuplabs industrial program is not necessarily about finding partners but about creating more high-growth technology companies with global ambitions in the financial industry. (Did I mention we're on our way to Denmark? 👋)

😬 Too many meetings?

A study consisting of 15 000 persons showed that professionals now spend more than half the standard workweek (21,5 hours) in meetings. That is an increase of 7 hours a week since the pandemic began. There might be many reasons for this, but I certainly enjoyed this article pushing back against meetings for developers.

At a cost of 2 hours in 'flow hours' per developer and 4 developers in this meeting, the meeting's developer opportunity cost is $1536. The meeting's opportunity cost is higher than the price of a brand-new M1 MacBook Pro. If the meeting was pointless, might as well cancel it and fly one of the devs to Bali instead. Shimin Zhang

🧐 GDPR killing innovation?

Control of data has its downsides as well. A newly published study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that GDPR comes at a substantial cost to innovation:

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.

🕷 The first NFT?

If you don't get this reference, I envy you! I recommend you find a spare meeting room to read this post by yourself!

That's it for this week 👋

Remember, if you’re enjoying this content, please do tell all your (fintech) friends to hit the subscribe button! If you have some feedback, you can always just hit reply!

Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X