Sweden has grown to becoming one of the leading FinTech hot beds in Europe. For WealthTech startup Kidbrooke, moving to the Scandinavian country has proven exceptionally beneficial.
While Kidbrooke was founded in London in 2011 and still has an office in the Big Smoke, the company has been operating out of its Stockholm offices for years.
Since making the move, the company has reeled in successes like a recent collaboration with financial service company Skandia and received accolades like bagging a spot on the coveted WealthTech100 list.
This is a level of success that Zaliia Gindullina, head of business development at Kidbrooke, is convinced that the company wouldn’t have achieved anywhere else. For instance, it was able to prove its concept with the Skandia team-up after four months of intense collaboration, which saw it seamlessly integrating the APIs with incumbent infrastructure and front-end.
So what does Kidbrooke do? “We are applying the success of Spotify to the wealth management industry. We are shifting the paradigm from ownership to access by providing companies such as Skandia with a turn-key solution,” said Gindullina when speaking with Invest Stockholm.
Or to put it another way, it is ensuring wealth management becomes something that not just the super rich, but that the regular Joe on the street can enjoy. This is in stark contrast to how the industry used to be run.
“A large part of the industry has simply become complacent, spoiled by traditionally high margins and little outside competition,” Gindullina said. “However, it is now clear that it is time to wake up for the traditional wealth managers if they hope to take advantage of the customer bases they have accumulated over the years. We think that collaboration with wealth managers is more likely to yield the most significant impact of technological innovation rather than going against them. The only thing that is needed is the willingness to adapt to new customer demands.”
Of course, Kidbrooke is not the only success story to come out of Sweden. Klarna is probably the most notable one. The Swedish instalments giant recently achieved a $10.65bn valuation, making it arguably Europe’s most valuable privately owned FinTech company. Other notable examples include Tink and Northmill.
The Nordics have enjoyed an increase in funding since 2015 when the region’s FinTech ventures raised $214.3m across 49 rounds, according to FinTech Global’s data. By 2019, that number had skyrocketed to $947.8m across 80 deals. The sector was seemingly on track for another record year in the first quarter of 2020, with the sector raising $321.6m across 17 deals. Like everything else in the industry, the future of the sector has been put in doubt due to the coronavirus.
Copyright © 2020 FinTech Global
