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Hi Daniel, nice to speak with you. Welcome as a new board member on our Fintech board!
In short, who are you?
I’m a happy father of 3 kids, 15, 12, and 5 years old—two boys and a girl, and I am married to Frida. In my spare time, I love playing tennis, golf, and working out. We ski in the winter and hike with the family in the summer. I live in a house outside of Stockholm.
What’s your background?
I’ve spent a few years in financial services, and in the last 5–10 years in Fintech and Neo Banking. Recently, I ended a five-year stint as the CEO of NStart, and before that, I worked at Swedbank as Vice President of Swedbank Markets and at the Norwegian investment bank, First Securities. In 2016, I decided to leave big banking. You learn a lot from big institutions, and you get to evolve as a leader, but ultimately I was a middle manager. It wasn’t really for me, so I wanted to start my own company. I left my banking career and started a SaaS/online marketplace company called Poppice. We created a self-serving platform that curated short-term office space and tried to accumulate as much as possible on the inventory side to match the demand. It was super hard to build, but it was a good learning experience. I leaned back towards the fintech space through NStart, after a couple of other growth projects within e-com.
Tell me more about the NStart journey!
We were one of the first companies to be awarded a “banking license” (CMC license). This was in 2019-2021, and the word on the street was that these licenses were impossible to get, but we thought differently and got it after a process of 3 years. We started with 4 employees, and I left when we were 45 people.
What does NStart do?
We were in consumer finance. If you know consumer finance and consumer loans, you know this is a market where most companies push out as many loans as possible at the highest interest rates. However, NStart thought differently. We looked at the "unbankable" customer—people with financial remarks or similar issues who couldn’t get credits from other banks. These customers needed help the most, so our idea was to approach them and look at a much wider set of data and insights. We tried to accumulate as much data as possible and even interviewed the customer over the phone. From this, we created our own credit model to pinpoint the customer and offer them a lower interest rate, giving them a chance to get out of debt quicker. We never lent new money and our perhaps counterintuitive goal as a consumer finance provider was to get the customer out of debt!
What do you believe you can contribute to the Fintech board?
I don’t have the most classical background, having worked with both large financial institutions and as an entrepreneur myself, so I know how difficult it is. But you learn a lot, and I am very humble toward entrepreneurship—it’s very hard. My experience is wide, and I think it has provided me with a sense of purpose. I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’ve built a company from scratch to something big, and I think I can contribute to the Wellstreet companies with my hands-on approach. I want to help the companies in building organization: working with structure, how to motivate employees and build a winning team, etc. I think I add value by understanding the day-to-day challenges entrepreneurs face.
“I’ve built a company from scratch to something big, and I think I can contribute to the Wellstreet companies with my hands-on approach.”
What types of companies get you excited in the Fintech space
right now?
1) What still excites me is people working with huge amounts of data and trying to develop products or services from it. I think this space is still overlooked. If you talk to large banks, they know data is important but don’t exactly know what to do with it. It’s hard to be big and innovative at the same time. Smaller companies offering services and products to help these banks with innovation are very interesting. Overall - ventures that target larger institutions (traditional banks, investment banks, fund managers etc).
2) Payments are still fascinating—we continue to see new payment companies taking fresh positions in the market.
3) I’m also amazed we don’t see more innovation in the capital markets. I think Lesslie is an exciting example, trying to impact the foreign exchange and liquidity market, and I hope to see more of these capital market innovations in the coming years and I think we will.
What advice would you give to a Fintech founder today?
Don’t worry so much about the uniqueness of the idea; my learning is that it comes down to execution. It’s much more important to do something today than to plan for what’s going to happen tomorrow. Be stubborn, and never stop trying. Just because you tried something that didn’t work the first time doesn’t mean it was the wrong play.
Thank you Daniel and welcome to the Wellstreet family!
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