More statistics and numbers can be found on our page Fintech Landscape.
Fintech Farm’s annual overview is once again ranking the Finnish fintech companies based on their financial figures from 2021 and providing an overview of the industry’s development.
The latest numbers show that the growth has stopped when it comes to the amount of fintech companies in Finland, but the total revenue of the industry’s slightly over 200 companies did increase from €1.2 billion in 2020 to €1.4 billion in 2021.
The biggest individual factor for the growth was ePassi’s leap from €111 million to €289 million. In general, a vast majority of the companies, from early stage startups to established companies, has managed to grow steadily.
Meanwhile, we can see a clear decrease in revenue within lending sphere as companies such as Multitude, Saldo, and Blue Finance have had challenges due to the tightened regulation in consumer lending.
Also, it’s worth noting that there has been a change in the reporting method for “Light Entrepreneurship” service providers – previously all the salaries paid from the employers to the employees through their platforms were counted as revenue, but nowadays only the provider’s margin is counted. So for instance UKKO.fi’s revenue decreased from €95 million to €8,5 million even though the size of the business remained the same.
Finland’s top funded fintech company, AlphaSense has not announced their 2021 revenue, but according to the news around their last funding round in June, their annual recurring revenue has surpassed €100 million.
TOP20 Finnish fintech companies in 2021
We have divided the listings into 3 categories.
Startups – Companies that have been founded 2017 or later
Scaleups – Companies that have been founded between 2012 and 2016
Established Companies – Firms that were founded before 2012
Fintech startups
This is the category of impressive growth and fresh success. The gold investment solution Voima Gold was once again the biggest fintech startup, though it’s worth noting that they count all their customers’ investments as revenue, while their own margin is around 3%.
The artificial intelligence pioneer Silo AI has kept on good growth, and in third place was the biggest uprunner of the year, Tesseract with an amazing 1069% growth.
The top 20 startup list featured companies from various categories, such as Web3 builder Equilibrium, RegTech companies iconicchain and Clento, InsurTech company Smartdrive, ESG tool Upright Project and various accounting and lending related startups.
Scaleups
The high valuations of cryptos in 2021 resulted in success for the crypto trading platforms in Finland. LocalBitcoins retained their impressive revenue, and Coinmotion was able to reach an outstanding 426% growth.
A 3-digit growth percentage was also reached by the accounting software firm Fennoa, and the financial product comparison service VertaaEnsin.fi.
GF Money and Fellow Finance were able to maintain their revenues even through the regulatory changes, such as the temporary interest rate cap. In the next year’s overview we will see Fellow Bank instead of Fellow Finance as they pivoted to become a bank earlier this year.
Notable events in 2021 in this category were the €45M funding round of the ‘Card as a Service’ provider Enfuce and the acquisition of LVS Brokers by Swedish Sambla.
Established companies
The title of Finland’s biggest fintech company (by revenue) was transferred from Multitude to ePassi. EPassi’s employee benefit payment ecosystem has been on a growth trajectory and they’ve acquired multiple companies from the neighboring countries. Once again, it’s good to note that ePassi’s revenue includes all the money charged to their customers’ wallets, while some 96% of it, is paid to the merchants.
In the world of banking technology, the older firms Samlink and Crosskey were able to grow.
Significant growth was seen at Paytrail, which acquired Checkout Finland, and Nomentia which has been through multiple M&A arrangements in recent years.
Conclusions
The Finnish fintech industry is growing steadily. While it’s to be expected that the startups have bigger growth rates, the more moderate growth of scale-ups and established companies should be applauded as well. The industry is clearly entering a quality over quantity era, where we see more and more consolidation and international success.
It’s worth noting that 2021 was a record-breaking year in fintech funding, and 2022 is already beyond that.
Learn more
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Fintech Farm
Fintech Farm is a financial technology hub and a digital finance service company connecting banks, fintech companies and service providers. Fintech Farm provides innovation, consulting, acceleration, matchmaking, and training services for the financial industry. Fintech Farm Ltd. is privately held and has built a vibrant community of over 200 financial industry organizations since 2016.
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