TPT #51 NORDICS

Welcome to the Payments Trilog, where three seasoned professionals discuss payments and more, for Europe and beyond.

Hello, my name is Michael Salmony and Javier and Ralph and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the Payments Trilog.

And this time we have Ville from the Nordics.

I'm particularly excited to hear from him because I think we can all learn from the Nordics.

They are ahead in everything.

If memory serves right, they invented central bank money.

The Swedish bank was the first to do that.

They did the first CBDC in the world, Avant, I think it was called, in Finland.

Basically, they invented mobile banking or mobiles with the Nokia.

Buy now, pay later, Klarna.

They pioneered EID, e-invoicing.

I've always been impressed with the Nordics.

If you want to see the future, you need to look there.

And Wille is part of that community.

He's all over European payments, which he can explain to us in a moment.

And so welcome to you, Ville.

Maybe you can tell us a little bit where you come from and then we can dive into some of the fun topics that we've prepared with you.

Thank you for the kind introduction.

Good to be here today.

And you covered it quite well, actually.

So I work in the Nordics.

I work for Nordea Bank with the transaction banking strategy.

And in my free time, I'm a complete payment nerd.

I also have my own podcast together with my friend Paul Krogdal.

So it's called Fintech Daydreaming and actually quite fun to be on this side of the table every now and then.

And finally, of course, a disclaimer that I always have to give is that the views and opinions that I give now are my own and not necessarily those of Nordea Bank.

So I think it was good to get that out of the way before the PR department calls me tomorrow.

Understood.

Thank you, Billy.

So we can start.