NextGen Nordics 2025: Live updates from Stockholm

Sessions:

• Welcome remarks
• Keynote interview with Bankgirot
• Panel session: Revolutionising payments across the Nordics
• Panel session: How to fortify operational resilience in the face of DORA
• Panel session: Preparing for VoP
• Panel session: Do the benefits of CBDCs outweigh the risk of disintermediation of native banking systems? 
• Panel session: Faster Payments, faster fraud
• Keynote presentation: Leveraging data and AI within Europe's regulatory landscape
• Fireside chat: Are the Nordics still dominating the fintech revolution? 
• Audience-led open forum: Can the Nordics lead the Open Finance revolution? 
• Panel session: What’s next for Nordic payments?

Welcome remarks

“You’re here to see your peers, you’re here to share ideas,” Debi Bell Hosking kicked off NextGen Nordics 2025 by welcoming the audience. Referencing Finextra’s latest survey on 2025 challenges and priorities in Nordic payments, Hosking teased the conversations for the day to come, as Nordic banks show clear focus on innovation at scale—in fact, 32% of Nordic organisations see ‘accelerating technology adoption’ as their main priority, followed by ‘improving customer experience’.

Finalising the welcome remarks, Hosking shared the first audience poll of the day: As we strive for frictionless payments, do you want more friction to identify fraud? The majority of the audience voted yes. An even bigger majority of the audience voted yes when asked whether regulation was stifling innovation in their organisation.

Keynote interview: Bankgirot

The welcome remarks were followed by a keynote interview between Debi Bell Hosking and Clarina Olsson, CEO at Bankgirot. Looking at Bankgirot’s goals for 2025, Olsson emphasised their focus on building the new payments system, but how to strike the balance between innovation and compliance? “At the moment, it’s only about compliance. We need to build the new platform for mass payments. We need to fulfil the regulations. Balance is not an issue right now, because 2025 is just about compliance.“ Olsson added: “Standardisation and regulation can be the foundation for innovation, but we are not there yet.”

The conversation turned towards P27, with commentary from the audience confirming that the amount of regulation was part of the reason why the project ultimately failed. A second audience member, who was part of P27, confirmed that internal governance and a wrong vendor selection were additional lessons learned.

Olsson also commented that she didn’t think the Nordics were ready for another project like P27, as countries focus on their own projects. “We’re building a new platform for batch payments in Sweden, and next year banks will migrate from the old platform to the new.”

Finalising on what keeps her up at night, Olsson stated the importance of not just cyber security and fraud prevention, but also preparedness regarding the geopolitical situation. “These are uncertain times. We need to be prepared much more now than five to ten years ago.”

Panel Session: Revolutionising payments across the Nordics

The first panel session of the day explored the evolution of the Nordics' payments industry – and analysed the impact of various dynamic factors on its banks.

Populating the panel was Sarah Fallström, Visa; Martin Georgzén, Bankgirot; Anders Olofsson, Tietoevry Banking; and Perttu Kröger, Vipps MobilePay.

Moderator, Liam Xavier, Finextra, kicked off by asking the panel to pinpoint some of the key trends that are underway in the domestic payments space, as well as across the Nordics, and how this compares to global trends.   

Fallström underlined the area of cross-border payments as a key opportunity for banks. “We’re witnessing the consumerisation of business payments,” she said. “End-users bring their lives into the workplace and expect payments to be the same speed and efficiency.” Banks must listen to these needs and build foundations to scale and adapt their infrastructure accordingly, in order to avoid losing corporate business, she said.

Bankgirot’s position differed: “We are more focused on the domestic market in Sweden,” Georgzén said. “We are currently running a huge compliance project to adjust to the needs of the market, so cross-border payments won’t be at the top of our agenda for a couple of years.” Nevertheless, Georgzén recognised the importance of standardisation and increased efficiency via ISO 20022, for connectivity between currencies.

Cross-border payments were a key focus for Vipps MobilePay in the last year, Kröger noted. He pointed out that on the consumer side, card-to-card payments were a “key means to ease pressures.” In many ways, such changes and co-operation levels have been spurred on by the “political situation”.

Olofsson argued that while there has been plenty of change in the Nordics payment space, players 15 years ago would be “disappointed” if they could see where we are now. “We wanted to bring higher efficiencies and lower costs to banks when processing. We wanted to ensure banks could compete with new market entrants. Now, in 2025, we are seeing mega tech companies coming in and taking the market, and we are yet to see a centralised infrastructure.” Olofsson pointed to wallets as "eating" a large share of the space.

Attendees were left to consider what this will mean for Nordic banks in the short to mid-term, and how they might address bold levels of competition from new entrants, while at the same time ensure end-users receive the breadth of choice they demand.

“We need a master plan for the Nordics,” Olofsson concluded.

Panel session: How to fortify operational resilience in the face of DORA

The second panel of the day explored the impact and growing demands of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) for financial institutions in the Nordics. Moderated by Finextra’s head of research, Gary Wright, the panel consisted of Christina Fransson, senior payment product specialist at FIS; Jon Påhls, head of engineering at Ericsson Mobile Financial Services; and Marilin Pikaro, director, innovation, conduct and consumers at the European Banking Authority (EBA).

Wright started the session by asking Pikaro about the underlying logic of introducing DORA. “What we saw in recent years was increased complexity, various incidents, and concerns around privacy,” commented Pikaro. “But it’s not only happening in banks. It’s for financial entities and non-financial entities alike. The risk landscape is evolving, and it doesn’t correspond to the historical risk management principles, so DORA is designed to harmonise the practice across the EU.”

A first audience panel asked for the Nordic readiness for DORA, considering it came into effect in January of this year. How prepared is your organisation for the implementation of DORA?

• In progress – we have started but still have key gaps: 60%
• Fully prepared – we have a clear roadmap and compliance measures underway – 35 %
• Unfamiliar, we need to learn more before we can plan efficiently –3%
• Aware, but not yet acting – 2%

The panel discussed what the main challenges of the implementation are. Fransson emphasised: “The objective of DORA is clear, but the actual regulatory technical standards remain unclear. A lot of financial institutions are trying to make an interpretation of what DORA is, and so you end up with many different interpretations. It’s important to keep in mind that the aim of DORA is operational resilience—not compliance.”

A second audience poll confirmed what most see as short-term complications in implementing DORA: Do you believe DORA will improve your organisation’s long-term operational resilience, or simply increase compliance burden?

• A mix – it brings benefits but the short-term burden is high – 65%
• Yes – it will enhance resilience and benefit us in the long run 27%
• No – it’s largely a regulatory box-ticking exercise 6%
• Not sure – too early to tell 3%

Påhls emphasised that it was important not to look at DORA as a tick-box exercise: “A lot of people are linking DORA to existing standards that they are already adhering to. [..] DORA is not a regulation as such. I think it’s largely a mapping exercise. Yes, there are a few new things and yes, you will have to educate your people, but mostly we already adhere to a lot of regulation. This just adds a holistic layer on top of it, forcing us to collaborate and cooperate. Look at what happened yesterday in Spain and Portugal. People went crazy. So this resilience is super important.”

The panel finalised that while implementation challenges, particularly around clarity of third-party providers (which Pikaro confirmed the EBA is prioritising in 2025) and technical standards of DORA remain, harmonising frameworks is crucial for operational resilience across Europe.

Panel session: Preparing for VoP

The next panel examined the readiness of Nordic banks and ongoing challenges they face in the transition to Verification of Payee (VoP) as the region strives for more secure digital payment systems.

Moderated by Sarah Hager, CCO at Enable Banking, the panel consisted of Bridget Meijer, new markets manager at SurePay; Emmie Silén, product manager at SEB; Matthieu Mulot, global product manager, VoP and compliance at Worldline; Paulina Kudlacik, Confirmation of Payee scheme manager at the Nordic Payment Council; and Ylva Palmqvist, commercial lead, payments at Danske Bank.

Hager started the session by imploring the audience to stand up, and gradually asked them to sit down depending on their organisation’s VoP readiness. Setting the scene for the rest of the conversation, only one person remained standing at 100%.

Kudlacik began by explaining the current VoP context, and shared news from the NCP on an evaluation of the existing Confirmation of Payee (CoP) scheme. While the CoP scheme was market-driven and from the P27 time, “VoP is regulatory-driven scheme in response to the instant payment regulation. Reviewing scope and functionality of the scheme, the NPC has come to the conclusion that the CoP scheme has become obsolete with time and will close down the scheme. We are now staring work on a new rulebook to verify payments in the Nordics.”

As we are nearing the October deadline of VoP, the panel discussed the existing challenges. Palmqvist explained that one of Danske Bank’s learnings from the UK scheme has been to work closer with corporate customers, especially in regards to batch payments. “We had too many close matches in the beginning which disrupted the payment process, so we had to tweak the matching rules. Taking this to the Nordic concept is even more important, because we have so many ways of spelling out names.“ She added that from her experience, a lot of their clients’ middleware is also not ready for VoP yet.

Similarly, Meijer referenced learnings from the Netherlands: “In the Netherlands we saw fraudsters will move to banks who do not have VoP implemented, and once all the banks have VoP, they will then move to countries that have not implemented VoP.” So even if the VoP deadline is in 2027 for certain organisations, they should not wait to start with planning and implementing.

Silén emphasised that “a lot of pieces of this puzzle need to come together, especially with the file flows. You need a solution for each and every payment channel. Especially the online channel where you have the customers attention all the time.” She added: “We need to build more flexible solutions so customers can choose what suits them best.”

Another challenge is the timing. By October, “we are expected to have the full version of everything,” explained Mulot. “We know the interoperability testing will happen during the summer, where people want to be on the beach. It’s a bit risky, if you’re being transparent.” But in the end, VoP “will bring trust. It opens the door to alternative payment means, and we are setting the foundation for more embedded payments.”

Finalising, Kudlacik emphasised that there is still work to do for the NPC on the rulebook, the road to harmonisation will also be affected by challenges that emerge on the way. There is a rocky road towards harmonisation, because “we know that the legislator wants to align the rules and requirements throughout the European Union, and […] the regulation and other market circumstances have changed our priorities.” Another aspect is use-cases further down the road: “As payment infrastructure changes, we need to also think how VoP changes, because now the rulebooks are tied to payments in certain currencies or certain payment schemes.”

Yet despite the challenges, the panel agreed that once VoP is implemented, additional services and use cases will emerge that will allow banks to feed better data to their various systems and, ultimately, better serve their customers—both private and corporate.

Panel session: Do the benefits of CBDCs outweigh the risk of disintermediation of native banking systems? 

In this session, speakers explored the extent to which Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) pose a threat to conventional banking, and how Nordic central banks are responding to increasing momentum.

Looking to analyse some of the potential use cases – across retail and commercial – as well as the stablecoin alternatives, were Sebastian Siepen, European Central Bank; Ville Sointu, Nordea; and Jonas Palm, BNP Paribas. The panel was moderated by Anders Olofsson, Tietoevry Banking.

With the ECB currently working on a digital Euro, Siepen kicked off by pointing out that “the commercial banks are key to distribution”, so “disintermediation” is not an option. “Let me give you three figures,” he said. “69, 9, and 99…69% of payments within the Eurozone are done via international card schemes; 9% - up from 1% in 2019 - are made by digital wallets; and 99% of stablecoins issued today are denominated in US dollars. This is why we need CBDCs.” Indeed, it is critical that consumers have access to digital central bank money, and that banks remain relevant on the payments landscape.

With geopolitical risks rising, emphasis on European sovereignty has also increased – and payments play a vital role in this, Siepen added. “In the Eurozone it is critical that one can always pay with Euros. The consumer should be able, at the point of sale – be it e-commerce or a [business-to-business] transaction – to use the Euro.”

BNP Paribas, for its part, is not issuing any stablecoins but it is involved in several interbank initiatives in the space. Representing the bank, Palm said: “We are quite advanced in looking at tokenised deposits. In general, we are positive on CBDCs and distributed ledgers, but we’re mostly driven by consumer need. Going beyond the experimental stages will really require some kind of customer drive or business need that we can identify. In the retail space, we're struggling to find true use cases for both CBDCs and other digital currencies.”

This is just one reason for the lack of CBDC proliferation. Sointu argued that in the private sector, collaboration will be foundational – but is always easier said than done. Factors such as “competition, competition law and enforcement, and the business case” are hard to achieve at a pan-European scale. “If stablecoins were more commercially viable, they would already be everywhere,” Sointu concluded.

Palm underlined that, in essence, stablecoins are investment vehicles for the public. They are not, in other words, used on a daily basis in the manner that a digital currency would be. So, getting the end-user to embrace a CBDC in the way that it is intended may be challenging. “Should we implement a new kind of infrastructure based on distributed ledger technology, simply because it's a new technology? Or is it possible to work with the existing infrastructures that are out there?” asked Palm.

Despite the purported benefits of CBDCs, it would seem that both the banks and the consumers are not quite ready.

Panel session: Faster Payments, faster fraud

The next panel examined how Nordic financial services are enhancing fraud risk management practices and leveraging innovation. Moderated by Oskar Havland, consultant at Havland Consulting, the panel consisted of Adam Gable, senior product director at Temenos; Dan Axelsson, payment expert at Nordea; Fredrik Tallqvist, regional representative Finland and the Baltic countries at EBA Clearing; and Mauriceo Castanheiro, VP, strategic fraud advisor at Nasdaq Verafin.

Setting the scene, Tallqvist explained: “Instant payments became a reality five years ago, but already then we could see that fraud rates are much higher. Last year, fraud rates were roughly six times higher compared to classic credit transfers. This year, this number is nine times. It’s growing rapidly, which is quite alarming.”

Examining the Swedish market, Axelsson explained the importance of security as key pillars in fighting fraud. “If you look at wallet solutions, VoP has been there since day one. So the mindset to have security, and collaboration, from day one has been key in these developments. If we look at Swish and Vipps, all that has been banking collaboration at its finest.”

Gable went on to explain how the “evolution of faster payments has been a cat and mouse game driven by regulation and how fraudsters have exploited the system. Customer authentication became a standard a while back, and now, with faster payments, you’ve seen this explosion of fraud—especially APP fraud—which led to VoP.”

Yet fraudsters started outsmarting the VoP as well. “Roughly 50% of all fraudulent transactions pass VoP checks, and roughly 10% of good transactions are stopped—which is bad friction. VoP helps, but only relying on VoP will not fix everything,” explained Tallqvist.

Gable went on to state that surprisingly a lot of people overwrite the VoP match, which is why the UK has last year introduced another evolution of fraud prevention—the PSR’s regulatory framework to split liability 50:50 between sending and receiving firms. “What we’ve seen is that this is sharpening the focus of all interested parties. It brings together both disciplines of anti-fraud and AML—both sides of the transaction.”

Looking forward, Castanheiro spoke on his experience on the future of the fraud detection and mitigation space. “In terms of effective framework, consortium data and consortium analytics can help organisations better understand risk. The challenge is that a lot of these solutions are network specific. But bad actors are jumping between domestic rails before going international. In that situation even Swift, with their vast reach internationally, are limited in the view that they see domestically.”

Castanheiro continued about his work at Nasdaq Verafin: “We are working in that problem right now, to link data from multiple geographies, multiple domestic and cross-border networks into one single view to see what’s happening at industry level. I think that’s where the industry is going in the future. Your typical fraud value chain needs to change.”

The question now is how organisations can stage this into their investment cycles. Banks have a lot of their plates, so the reality of leveraging these capabilities is largely a funding and priority problem.

Keynote presentation: Leveraging Data and AI within Europe's regulatory landscape

Next was a keynote presentation by Dr. Igor Mate, director, data privacy and digital regulation at Permobil, and co-chair, Connect Communities.

Permobil, a med-tech company, today faces similar challenges to the financial services industry – particularly around how to address and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which is heavily regulated in the Nordics region.

“We are in quite good shape,” Mate began, pointing to a December 2024 survey on the financial industry’s adoption of AI in Sweden. It revealed that company-level AI deployment is at around 40%, with employee use of AI at 25%. Preparations for AI regulation, however, is 10%.

“What about managing and mitigating the risks?” Mate asked. “A very minor focus is about the preparation for the EU, AI Act, itself.” While the EU AI Act entered into force on 1 August 1, 2024, it will become fully applicable on 2 August, 2026. This is a comprehensive regulation, so it is incumbent on firms to begin preparing today.

But what are the outputs of those employees that do use AI? According to the survey, most (68%) seem to favour it for searches and information summaries; followed by (58%) for translation; and (52%) for text content generation. Most departments and functions that deploy these tools are “existing workflows and existing processes within the organisation,” Mate observed. “AI is not some magic technology – it is something very human.” Interestingly, the survey also revealed only one instance of AI being used for cyber security; and two for market risk models.

When asked why Sweden’s financial sector has been slower to adopt AI than other countries’, Mate pointed to the fact that compliance can be a “headache”. “The financial industry is the second most regulated industry in the world, after the atomic energy,” he said. “That was the decisive answer from the respondents.”

Looking to the horizon, Mate argued that it is time for the industry to “face the monster,” and use compliance to unlock innovation and value. “If you take the transparency requirements under the AI Act, for instance, they’re not just about removing biases or bad decisions, they’re about the relevance, efficiency, and effective usage of AI as a tool.” Mate added that if businesses take steps to implement the AI Act today, their employees’ commitment to, and confidence in using, AI will be supercharged.

To this end, Mate went on to recommend company-wide AI and data literacy programmes: “AI-literate teams enjoy a competitive edge, market leadership, faster innovation, stronger customer loyalty, higher acquisition success, and stronger regulatory positioning.”

The keynote presentation was closed with three key takeaways:

1. If data is the new oil, then compliance is the refinery
2. Regulations don’t hinder innovation, they structure it
3. Digital compliance shouldn’t be seen as a cost line, but a catalyst for growth

In the final words of Mate, “it is the error of any industry to say that it will not prioritise AI.”

Fireside chat: Are the Nordics still dominating the fintech revolution?

NextGen Nordics’ afternoon fireside chat—a conversation between Bo Knoblauch, director business development executive at Visa Direct and Nanna Bergmann, managing director at Moonrise, hosted by Gary Wright, head of research at Finextra—discussed the Nordic status as a region renowned for producing innovative fintech startups that disrupt traditional payment methods.

The discussion explored how banks and fintechs balance competition and collaboration, and whether banks are realising how much of their market share is being eaten up by fintechs. Knoblauch explained: “Banks and fintechs, especially when we talk about consumer payments, are serving some of the same user segments. With P2P payments, particularly across borders, consumers are looking for the same experience they get in domestic markets. It needs to be real-time, and a lot of fintechs have picked up on that.”

Especially in the cross-border space, there are still gaps to be filled. One of them is high-value transfers, which Bermann highlighted are still often based on correspondent banking relationships and can involve long timeframes and lots of friction.
Other untapped opportunity lies in SMB and corporate payments. Knoblauch highlighted that Visa Direct has identified that there is a $200 trillion global opportunity in business payments, calling out that banks need to provide modern payment rails to their SMB customers for every payment, not just domestic.

When asked how banks can effectively adapt to meet those needs, Bergmann quipped: “Can you change the engine while the plane is flying? It’s really hard for banks. Working with partners can help in extending their offering. But you need to define what part of the value chain you want to own as a company. Do you want to own the consumer relationship? Then you have to get serious to do that really well. Does that mean that you have to have a full, modernised stack behind it? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you can actually tap it in some partners that help close the gap, so that you can excel in the interface that you want to own.”

Concluding the session, Knoblauch commented: “There is a huge fintech demand out here, but looking at the functionality, it is possible for every bank to tap into that.”

Audience-led open forum: Can the Nordics lead the Open Finance revolution? 

In this interactive open forum, moderator Sarah Hager, CCO at Enable Banking, used Slido and a live Q&A to get a sense of how well-positioned the Nordics are to lead the global shift to Open Finance. Here is an overview of audience sentiment: 

Have you observed a shift in user behaviour around data sharing in the last two years? 

• Yes, willing to share more = 42%
• Yes, more cautions = 38%
• No noticeable change = 20%

What is the most important factor in building trust between banks and fintechs? 

• Strong security protocols = 35%
• Shared standards = 19%
• Joint innovation projects = 24% 
• Clear regulation = 17%
• Other = 5%

Have the lessons from the PSD2 implementation in the Nordics been effectively applied to the development of open finance? 

• Not sure = 40%
• No = 26%
• Somewhat = 24%  
• Yes = 10%

How ready are you with open banking to take on open finance? 

• 20% ready = 33%
• 40% ready = 30%
• 60% ready = 15%
• 100% ready = 15%
• 80% ready = 7% 

Panel session: What’s next for Nordic payments? 

The last panel of the day summarised the day’s discussions and cast a look forward to explore what we can expect over the next 12 months considering the rapid evolution of the Nordic payments landscape. 

Moderated by Debi Bell Hoskings, the conversation featured Camilla Åkerman, secretary general of the Nordic Payments Council (NPC); Daniel Lexander, head of payment products at SEB; and Robert Pehrson, head of payments & accounts at Swedbank. 

A few last Slidos to the audience revealed the overall Nordic sentiment as we move further into 2025. Only 3% stated that they were ready for G20 cross-border instant payments, and the audience was evenly divided (exactly 50:50) when asked whether they’d like to be closer to the euro than their own currency. But perhaps most surprisingly of all, the day’s sessions appear to have changed the audience’s mind on the impact of regulation. When asked whether they think regulatory changes are positive and moving in the right direction, a total of 86% voted yes.

Pehrson commented: “This makes a lot of sense, because as an industry, we are in a position right now where we need to innovate in a pretty complex ecosystem. A requirement for that to happen is that we have a common understanding on how we harmonise everything from standards to rule books. So to me, regulation is a democratic way of fostering and guiding collaboration.”

When prompted about their own priorities going into 2025, Lexander stated that SEB has “a really busy agenda on the infrastructure side. It will be the transitions of the central banks into ISO 20022, the Bankgirot infrastructure we've heard a lot about today, and the SEPA Instant deadline as our main themes.” 

Pehrson commented that Swedbank was focusing on “keeping the existing promise to our customers, making sure that our infrastructure and deliveries are stable, secure and resilient, and then, in line with what Daniel said, it is about focusing on the development efforts on what's really needed to transform the Swedish market.”

The Nordic Payments Council, as explained by Åkerman, will focus on delivering “rule books to the Nordic markets. One for the cross-border, cross-currency instant payments, and then, as announced earlier, we will also develop a new rule book for Verification of Payee. We also have to support our 70 scheme participants that are now live in our schemes. That is very important, as well as monitoring the Bankgirot transition programme.”

Asked what financial institutions should be prioritising in 2025, Åkerman highlighted collaboration, Pehrson emphasised stability and resilience, and Lexander prioritised the Bankgirot transition as “critical for us as a community.”
 

Thank you to everyone who joined us today at NextGen Nordics 2025. To those of you that couldn’t make it—we hope to see you next year!