Futureproofing Fintech: Ready for What's Next

This year's theme reflected the moment we're all living through. Shifting geopolitics, trade disruptions, wars, and the rapid advance of AI are reshaping how businesses operate, how products are built, and how people find their footing in a rapidly changing world. Norway Fintech Festival 2026 set out to meet that uncertainty head-on - with ideas, conversations, and perspectives to help the industry navigate what's coming.

From Geopolitics to Football and Startup Growth

The festival opened with Jeremy Ghez, professor at HEC Paris, who challenged the audience to rethink Europe's place in the new global order. In a world that has shifted from multilateral cooperation to transactional deal-making, he argued that Europe's reputation for predictability and regulatory consistency, often dismissed as bureaucratic slowness, may actually be its greatest competitive advantage. For Norway, the question is: can stability become a platform to attract talent and capital in an era defined by volatility?

Norway Fintech Festival takes pride in thinking outside the normal bounds of finance and fintech. Day one featured a panel discussion with Brede Hangeland (player manager for the Norwegian football team) Therese Egeland (NHH), and Rune Garborg (Vipps) on building high-performing teams — a conversation that resonated well beyond sport.

The core argument: collective culture beats individual brilliance. Know your people, dream big, give honest feedback, and create the conditions for people to do their best work. Garborg brought it into the Vipps context, competing against Apple Pay and global big tech isn't easy, but passion for what you're building and genuine pride in your values goes a long way.

On day two of the festival, Matt Lerner, formerly of PayPal, delivered one of the most practical keynotes of the festival. His message: most startups don't have a growth problem, they have a focus problem. Talk to your customers. Experiment. Fail faster. This is perhaps not a new idea, but grounded in enough real examples that the room was taking notes (and pictures).

A Program Spanning the Full Width of Fintech

With 120 speakers and more than 60 sessions, there was a lot going on — and that was the point.

AI ran through the programme like a live wire. Not as a buzzword, but as a genuine operational challenge that nearly every organisation in the room is grappling with. How do you deploy it responsibly in a regulated environment? What does it mean for your workforce and your risk profile? Speakers from DNB, Kantega, Noria, and Boost.ai brought grounded, practical perspectives - more "here's what we're learning" than "here's the future." Attendees also got to see AI inspirational pitches from AI companies like Crunched, Novem, Quantfolio, Bislab, and even NVIDIA.

Payments, digital identity, and financial crime all had strong tracks. Klarna, Revolut, Visa, and Vipps covered the payments landscape from infrastructure to consumer behaviour. Signicat, Mobai, and the Norwegian Data Protection Authority worked through what the EU Digital Identity framework means in practice.

And financial crime, fraud, AML, and compliance got serious airtime, with Deloitte, Tieto Banktech, Lucinity, and Strise among those tackling a challenge that isn't getting any simpler.

Blockchain and digital assets, open banking, insurtech, wealth tech, and the regulatory horizon — DORA, PSD3, AI governance — all featured too. For founders and investors, there was a dedicated focus on what building and scaling in the Nordic ecosystem actually looks like right now, and what it takes to secure funding for startups in Norway and the Nordics.

Norway Fintech Festival Young: The Next Generation of Fintech

The festival kicked off on Tuesday with Norway Fintech Festival YOUNG (NFF Young) - a free, half-day conference for students and young professionals. The programme covered the future of banking, fintech, AI, and user experience, with speakers such as Erik Bohne (Astar), Marius Hauken (Heder Bank), Jenny Huse (influencer), Andreas Talseth (Revolut), Kinga Uthaug (Bulder) and Petter Haga (speaker and entertainer). Companies set up stands to connect directly with students, and the room had the kind of energy you get when people are genuinely figuring out where they want to go, not just attending another career fair.

For students, it's a rare chance to meet potential employers, talk to peers who care about the same things, and get a real feel for an industry that has never been more exciting, but also undergoing great change in the age of AI. For the ecosystem, NFF YOUNG also serves as a reminder that the people who will build the next wave of fintech are already here — and paying attention.

The Secret Ingredients

All in all, the feedback from the fintech community has been overwhelmingly positive, and we can conclude that 2026 has been yet another festival success. So, what does it take to make a memorable fintech conference you ask?

Firstly: Norway Fintech Festival is a festival, not just a conference - and that distinction matters. The first evening ended with live music, which meant good conversations continued somewhere louder and more fun. A social run and a mountain hike rounded out the days. The programme is only part of what people come for.

Secondly: The numbers tell part of the story, but not all of it. What makes Norway Fintech Festival distinctive is harder to quantify - the energy in the room, the smiles, the conversations between people who had never met before and left as collaborators. A trend that says a lot: attendees from one year are increasingly becoming partners the next. That's not a marketing metric. That's real value.

And behind it all is a team at Finance Innovation that puts a genuine piece of themselves into every detail. The long days, the small decisions nobody notices when they go right, the shared ambition to build something that feels different. That's the real secret ingredient. It's not scalable, it's not replicable. And it's exactly why it works.

See You in 2027!

Norway Fintech Festival returns to Bergen, 13–15 April 2027. We're already asking ourselves how we top this one...!