Building your fintech to scale
Lessons in success from Nordic scale-ups
How do you build a FinTech with the potential to scale successfully? In collaboration with Copenhagen Fintech, we surveyed over 80 FinTechs to explore this challenge and better understand the success criteria.
We also conducted interview with FinTech CxOs (including from FinTech unicorns), cluster organisations, as well as wider industry experts, exploring perspectives from those with deep hands-on experience.
The Danish and Nordic FinTech start-up ecosystem has grown exponentially, with an explosion in the number of investments and companies over the past five years. Fintech is the largest and fastest growing category in the Nordic start-up ecosystem in terms of investments. Yet, despite these favourable conditions, many FinTechs still face challenges when they want to scale internationally.
Using our survey and interviews, we’ve uncovered common success factors and devised a series of practical actions that can help start-ups reach their scaling ambitions. While the findings come from FinTechs in the Nordics, and will be particularly useful for players in the financial services ecosystem, our recommendations are valuable to start-ups across sectors around the world.
It is not a question about whether or not to scale, it is a question of when.”
Key findings
Practical actions to aid start-up scaling
Although each FinTech is unique and the journey to international scaling looks different for everyone, there are some common success factors that can increase the odds of scaling successfully.
Based on our research, FinTechs should consider three recommendations when scaling their businesses:
Create your roadmap
Craft a clear roadmap, based on your vision for how to scale your business, and keep evolving it.
Find the right skills
Access international competencies and keep challenging and upgrading your organisational setup.
Build your network
Surround yourself with the right people, which will allow you to access international advisors and capital.
Scaling a FinTech start-up is a discipline”
When scaling, it’s a constant trade-off between speed-to-market and building a high-quality scalable product”
