Introduction
Nordic Innovation
Nordic Innovation is an organization under the Nordic Council of Ministers. Nordic Innovation aims to make the Nordics a pioneering region for sustainable growth and works to promote entrepreneurship, innovation and competitiveness in Nordic business.
Nordic Scalers
Nordic Innovation contact
Anna-Maija Sunnanmark
Senior Innovation Adviser
A.Sunnanmark@nordicinnovation.org
Nina Egeli
Senior Innovation Adviser
N.Egeli@nordicinnovation.org
Edited by Adrian McDonald and Ally Zhu.
Design by Lovisa Berglund.
The Nordics: a Leading Hub for Scale-ups
Some say it's the entrepreneurial blood that runs deep in Nordic society, but there’s a common understanding that the Nordic region is one of the best in the world when it comes to starting and developing new companies. Despite its above OECD average in the number of new companies started, the challenge is that they seldom grow to scale. On average, Nordic countries have five scale-ups per 100,000 inhabitants, while in the US this figure is close to eight, and in Israel it is 12 1.
High-growth enterprises create employment, lead to greater efficiency and economic prosperity, solve societal challenges, contribute to sustainability goals and more. Our vision is to make the Nordics the leading region in the world not only for starting up, but also scaling up businesses.
This is why Nordic Innovation initiated Nordic Scalers, a program designed to help the best Nordic scale-up companies accelerate their growth by providing access to new competences, networks, markets, customers and capital.
Driving Impact with four x key scaling strategies
“Since the inception of the Nordic Scalers Pilot in 2017, we’ve been able to better understand the stages of scaling, the common challenges the scaleup companies face and, with support, how some of them have navigated all of these successfully. As such, we’re continuing to witness impact, in terms of economic growth and job creation, which our Alumni are creating,” says Anna-Maija Sunnanmark, Senior Advisor at Nordic Innovation.
Much of the support given to scale-ups during the Nordic Scalers Pilot related to the development of stronger scaling strategies, particularly in the areas of sales and marketing. We were able to pinpoint four key trends and drivers in our cohorts’ scaling strategies:
- Leveraging tech-enabled disruption
- Attracting top talent
- Internationalization and conquering new markets
- Fundraising and exit strategies to scale
“One of the vital ingredients of a healthy scale-up ecosystem is knowledge sharing and, for this reason, we’re highlighting some of the best practices of accelerated scaling from the Nordic Scalers Alumni,” added Sunnanmark.
As such, this pamphlet puts a spotlight on nine of the Nordic Scalers Alumni and their unique strategies to deal with the most common growth challenges and seize upon opportunities to scale. Together, these companies represent over €60m in annual turnover, employ over 670 people, and project continued revenue growth in the coming 18-months at an average rate of +85%.
1 Source: http://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1369201/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Featured Nordic Scalers Alumni
The following Nordic Scalers Alumni featured in this digital pamphlet include:
Iceland
Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson
CEO / Co-Founder
OZ lies at the intersection of live sports and gaming, with a mission to create spectacular video experiences for every sports league with no sacrifice in quality. Centred around their global roll-out of the OZ Connected Stadium available for any sport at any location, they offer a suite of services for sports leagues and federations to capture, enhance and distribute content.
Sweden
Anna Malkan
VP of Customer Success and BD
Volumental is the world’s leading footwear technology company. Volumental provides fit-based technology that helps your brand create an excellent in-store experience, generate perfect footwear recommendations, and improve customer loyalty. Volumental’s in-store hardware and software combine advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence with a delightfully simple user experience.
Denmark
Dennis Forchhammer
CEO / Co-Founder
dennis@happyhelper.dk
www.happyhelper.dk
Happy Helper is an online platform for on-demand cleaning services that connects customers with cleaners. They have created the first Danish platform insurance that insures both parties in bookings made through the platform.
Norway
Anders Johnsen
CEO
Documaster collects data from all your business systems and uses filters to find the documentation you are looking for, instantly. All in one place.
Norway
Pippa Boothman
VP of Marketing
pippa.boothman@disruptive-technologies.com
www.disruptive-technologies.com
Disruptive Technologies is the developer of the world’s smallest commercial-grade wireless sensors and a rapidly growing innovator in the IoT market. Their sensing solution based on these tiny sensors simplifies data collection and delivers the data securely to their dashboard (DT Studio) or their partners’ analytics programs in the cloud.
Finland
Atte Hujanen
CEO / Co-Founder
Available on all mobile platforms, web, Apple TV and Android TV, Singa gives you instant access to 80,000+ high quality karaoke songs - from evergreen classics to all the latest hits. They sell to both businesses like restaurants and directly to customers.
Finland
Mikael Kolehmainen
CEO / Co-Founder
mikael@trademarknow.com
www.trademarknow.com
TrademarkNow provides an intelligent web-based trademark management platform that enables brand owners, marketing professionals, and trademark attorneys to make rapid investigations of more than 180 Patent Trademark Office (PTO) databases and a multitude of common law sources to avoid potential trademark conflicts.
Meniga help people lead better financial lives by empowering them with the tools they need to better manage their personal finances as well as make the most of their hard-earned money through exciting rewards.
Meniga also work with financial institutions by partnering on a data-driven journey to drive customer engagement and develop new business models.
Image: Max Williams, Unsplash
Tech Enabled Disruption
A future of drone taxis, teleportation, and warp-speed travel feels ever closer to the present as our daily lives are further digitized and automated by blockchain, AI, and all-knowing algorithms. We see ground-breaking tech-enabled disruption creating value everywhere: McKinsey’s analysis reports that using technology to improve innovation and product development could deliver $166 billion to $477 billion in new revenue and $8 billion to $25 billion from margin expansion through greater efficiency in R&D.[1]
Since the Nordic Scalers program began in 2017, we have come to see this in our own alumni companies who’ve leveraged innovative technology to scale faster than their competitors. Disruption is defined as “a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses,” and integrating breakthrough technology into traditional processes allows smaller players to challenge legacy status quos very quickly. They do this by taking advantage of four key pillars in technology:
- Increased collection of data that gives 360 view of events and historical context
- Intelligence through analysis of events and prediction of the future
- Automation through high machine efficiency and human empathy
- Omnipresence through availability to serve beyond barriers
Underlying technology is so intrinsically linked to business models and agile ways of working, further giving tech-enabled companies speed as well as access to customers and capital at scale. We see this in three Nordic Scalers alumni companies: Refunder, Volumental and OZ Sports.
Volumental
Volumental is a tech-enabled scaleup working with leading footwear brands and retailers globally to ensure that people will never wear ill-fitting shoes again. They do this by leveraging data, intelligence and omnipresence, scanning customers' feet and recommending the shoes that will fit them best to deliver the best shopping experiences both in-store and online.
“Our 3D technology is not only the fastest and most accurate in the world, but we always focus on the shopper experience and ensuring our products are fun to use, intuitive and magical in their design.” said Anna Malkan, VP of Customer Success and Business Development.
While e-commerce is one of the spaces that has seen the greatest technological disruption, footwear still lags behind other product categories because shoe-fit is such a big concern for shoppers. Volumental believes that the brands and retailers who will win in the market are those that build omnichannel loyalty by delivering an incredible shopper experience across all channels. Thus far, they’ve helped more than 7 million shoppers find the best shoes in stores and are projected to bring in 10M in revenue in 2021.
Malkan mentions that one aspect Nordics Scalers helped with is bringing scalability to sales, especially in the way Volumental emphasized their tech-enabled drivers to deliver a seamless shopping experience. “Nordics Scalers helped us scale sales, and really reduce our time frame of sales cycles.”
“Our focus right now is making it super easy for our customers to onboard our new solutions. For retailers and brands, this means super easy integrations, in-store installations (5 minutes) and no-instructions-needed UIs. For shoppers it means visual recommendations that are clear and give confidence in selecting the best fitting products so that shoe-shopping becomes a delight even for those who have dreaded it in the past due to poor fit experiences,” added Malkan.
Their goal is to be the number one partner for overdelivering on omnichannel shopper expectations. With a global market in their sights, they hope that every single pair of shoes you wear will someday be informed by Volumental data ––– whether in the design, manufacturing, selection or marketing.
"Nordics Scalers helped us scale sales, and really reduce our time frame of sales cycles."
- Anna Malkan, Volumental
OZ Sports
With innovative mixed reality technology, OZ Sports is disrupting sports broadcasting by transforming live sport. They lie at the intersection of live sports and gaming, with a mission of bringing immersive experiences to sports fans across the globe. Any sport, any location. They offer a suite of services for sports clubs, leagues and federations to capture, enhance and distribute content, using artificial intelligence and mixed reality.
“We leverage machine learning and advanced GPU processing to bring down the cost of production by a factor of 10.” said Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson, CEO and Founder of Oz Sports.
One of its most exciting developments is their partnership with RVX to launch OZ ARena, which uses innovative mixed reality technologies to bring fans from their homes into live broadcasts. Offering full visual and audio augmentation, they’ve been able to bring virtual fans to empty sports stadiums where fans can personalise their experience with their own avatars, club shirts and genuine cheers from home, via an app - and even appear in their preferred seat. This has attracted attention in more than 150 publications worldwide, generating great traction on the deal pipeline.
As OZ Sports looks to the future, “we plan to roll out our technology at sports venues all over the world in a similar way as mobile operators roll out 5G. This will give us scale.” said Gudjonsson. This would unlock unprecedented scale. Gaining accessibility to the target market is perhaps the biggest priority right now, which they have already done in the past year by expanding to both the UK and US markets to add to its Icelandic, Central American and India operations.
Image: OZ Sports
Refunder
Refunder is a cash-back site for online shopping transforming e-commerce lead generation. For vendors, selling through the Refunder portal gives you high-quality and relevant data points on your consumers to better cater to them. The result is a win-win, two-way dialogue between retailers and consumers that bids farewell to traditional online lead generation practices relying on discounts, free trials and mailing lists to attract new customers.
“The cashback product is much easier for the customer to understand but it’s how we’ve utilized data and automation to really make the product more personalized and relevant. We are trying to change how lead generation works in e-commerce” said Fredrik Ohlsson, CEO and Co-Founder.
This transformative approach to lead generation has yielded Refunder an extremely loyal user base of more than 575.000 online shoppers (“members”) in Sweden already. They partner with more than 1000 ecommerce stores across all industries, from global chains like Adidas, Staples and Expedia to your trusted Apotek and ICA stores around the corner. By providing tangible cost-saving benefits to consumers, they in turn are able to provide partner vendors with higher quality leads. This scalable set-up in combination with customer-centric approach has allowed Refunder users to claim more than 133 Million SEK worth of cashbacks to date and over 1.5 billion SEK in sales.
Despite such an impressive track record of performance and innovative technology, they saw the Nordic Scalers program as a barometer for their strategy and prioritisation in the future. “Creativity isn’t a bottleneck for us, instead, scaling is about being operational and making our business about how we do things and what order of prioritisation we give to them. That, we have had a lot of help with. The Nordic Scalers program for us wasn't finding out what we wanted to do but more about breaking it down to what mattered” added Ohlsson.
Looking ahead, Refunder is structuring themselves to be fully automated so as to create a scalable operational platform to then establish themselves in more markets.
Image: You X Ventures Studio, Unsplash
The Importance of Attracting Top Talent
Many people say scaling “is all about the people and team execution” and they are right.
A study[1] of more than 600,000 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes found that high performers are 400 percent more productive than average ones. This difference in productivity only increases as jobs get more complex; in highly complex occupations like software developers and project managers, high performers are an astounding 800 percent more productive.
The relationship between quality of talent and business performance is dramatic, and it makes sense that securing talent is one of the key challenges to scaling a business. Although the companies have grown bigger in the scale-up phase, and perhaps developed stronger employer brands, they are typically still challenged by short supply of the highly talented staff they need.
In addition, there’s a widely held view that top talent are important drivers for broader economic growth and job creation. In well-respected economist Enrico Moretti’s research, he suggests that “each additional job in high-tech industries...is associated with an additional 4–5 jobs in the rest of the local economy over the next ten years.” [2]
These two key insights have heavily informed how many Nordics Scalers companies have made decisions. Whether it is personal networks, hiring people from abroad, or by establishing offices in markets where the talent supply is better, there are a series of approaches to building a strong team in the expansion phase. Knowing where and who creates value is key, and alumni companies Documaster and Happy Helper exemplify this understanding: Documaster by leveraging talent to scale exponentially, and Happy Helper through their mission to connect talent with those who need it the most in the home cleaning space.
[1] Source: Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle Jr., “The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality in individual performance,” Personal Psychology, Volume 65, Issue 1, Spring 2012, pp. 79–119, onlinelibrary.wiley.com.
Anders Johnsen, Documaster
"We ensure that our people have the freedom to make an impact.” - Anders Johnsen, Documaster
Documaster: attracting talent for scale
Documaster is an intuitive cloud storage platform that helps organizations digitize, manage and archive their data.
Their participation in the Nordic Scalers program rested heavily upon receiving support with finding scalability in new markets such as the UK. Largely, this involved building their strategy around delivery and support, sales and their value proposition for the next stage of their life stage. This type of strategy development also gave rise to an important exercise of mapping the competencies and skills needed for their future.
“The Nordic Scalers program helped us formulate a plan and decide where to make an effort, that would ultimately help us open up new markets and customer segments, such as the private sector. Success on the plan would boil down to strong execution from our people plus additional key resources that we would require,” said Anders Johnsen, CEO.
Soon thereafter, Documaster managed to raise $3.3m in funding to help scale their operations and team - adding key talent to the organisation and growing it by 49%. When asked how they have managed to compete against large tech enterprises for the very best people, Johnsen said:
“The success factors in attracting the best people rests upon 3 x strategies. First, we’ve engaged a network recruitment strategy, without using recruiters. Secondly, we’ve done everything we can to resist homogeny by focusing on diversity across all disciplines. Lastly, we ensure that our people have the freedom to make an impact.”
What is most telling, however, is their ability to outpace the rate of organisational growth when it comes to business deals such as the recent deals with major technology partner BBL as well as Telia in May 2020. The speed and size of such deals are important as they have translated to some 300% revenue growth in the same period as the organization grew - exemplifying the importance of what right talent can do to scaling a company.
“When you remove incentives for individual performance and unite your people around a shared goal, it’s amazing how much of an improvement you make in terms of business performance and collaboration between people” added Johnsen.
Image: Happy Helper
Happy Helper: creating jobs in local economies
Happy Helper is an online platform for on-demand cleaning services that connects customers with cleaners (“Helpers”) easily and quickly. Just as the case is in many other markets, the Danish home-cleaning market has historically been dominated by a black market, which still remains Happy Helper’s biggest competitor, where price has been the main driver. Happy Helper, however, has a mission to turn this around by building the most fair, equitable and transparent cleaning market possible to connect those seeking talent with those who need it in the most.
They created the first Danish platform insurance that insures both parties in bookings made through the system. It has provided thousands of families with more time and thousands of people with decent work, not least legally, reaching more than 48,000 cleanings in 6 months – moving them closer to their goal of 100,000 cleanings facilitated in one year.
“Nordic Scalers provided us with the tools and insights we needed to prioritize our growth drivers and both increase the volume of cleanings per year and Helpers” said Dennis Forchhammer, CEO and Co-Founder.
In recent months, Happy Helper has also noticed some interesting consumer shifts: they discovered that the higher quality network began to create more demand and efficiency in the model as a direct result of the increasing consumer demand for better hygiene and cleanliness in their homes – further proving that high quality talent can lead to exponential results.
“We believe that the recent trends we’re witnessing will contribute to a transformation of the cleaning market, making it extremely transparent.” added Forchhammer.
As their name suggests, Happy Helper’s ultimate goal lies in creating happiness. To get there, they continue to focus on scaling the company with priority being given to optimizing the platform experience, expanding to new countries, raising money, and tapping into new networks to further build a community of Happy Helpers.
Image: Nasa, Unsplash
Conquering New Markets
A Global Mindset
In contrast to many companies in large markets like China and the U.S, Nordic tech companies are typically thinking upon going global from day 0. Upon finding repeatability and scalability in the business model and an organization size of 35+, many companies shift focus to the next phase of scaling - expansion - when these day 0 global aspirations become strategies for accelerated growth. Statistically, Nordic scale-ups within Manufacturing and Wholesale exported for 17.4 billion EUR of goods in 2017 – up from 9.6 billion in the start of 2014.[1]
Conquering much larger new markets, however, has proven to be difficult for most companies, with some 7 out of 10 companies failing in their expansion efforts, according to Result in Stockholm. As a result, the Stockholm-based entrepreneurs at Result have established 5 core principles for internationalization covering the importance of: (1) Evaluating all markets, (2) Exploring all methods of entry, (3) Securing strong financial commitment, (4) Thinking long term with clear short term metrics, and (5) Prioritizing what works.
One of the most relevant principles today is prioritization: what are the business levers we can pull that will lead to maximum scale and impact? How do we pinpoint the biggest drivers so we can scale what works? Traditionally, this would mostly involve:
- Defining Total Addressable Market Making projections of your gross margins and your path to increasing them
- Plan of attack for distribution and customer acquisition
- Scaling the network effects of your technology.
- Focus on building high gross margins
In more recent months, additional priorities have become important, including:
- Prioritizing becoming cash-flow positive first, or developing a clear path to becoming cash-flow positive
- Establish a cost-efficient cost structure which is adaptable to changes in the market
Image: Singa
Singa
Singa, a Finnish platform that gives you instant access to 80,000+ high quality karaoke songs, is a Nordic Scalers Alumni that has been applying such principles to successfully find scalability worldwide.
“The pandemic gave us newfound focus due to all sorts non-core things melted away and our teams doubled down on product development and forging new commercial deals - and nothing else. We've shifted our entire mindset from "business as usual" to "will this 10x our impact?”. Instead of market-by-market or feature-by-feature, we think on a global scale and through the entire strategy.” says Atte Hujanen, Co-Founder and CEO of Singa.
In fact, Singa has been able to expand to Australia and the US during 2020, reeling in exciting big copyright licensing deals. They further validate how online platforms are transforming the way the world consumes products and services, particularly low-touch, low-cost SaaS. “By removing the traditional hardware barriers and offering flexible pricing packages, our customers are able to save time and money by accessing the platform instantly.” said Hujanen.
One of their strongest assets in their expansion success is also their team, consisting of industry veterans who are young enough to have both the drive to succeed and experience in balancing their strategy with speed. “Our team has been able to execute our expansion strategy well, with thanks to the Nordic Scalers program which gave us the necessary experiences from entrepreneurs who’d done this type of journey before” added Hujanen.
Instead of market-by-market or feature-by-feature, we think on a global scale and through the entire strategy,” Atte Hujanen, Singa.
Disruptive Technologies
For Disruptive Technologies, the Norwegian developer of the world’s smallest commercial-grade wireless sensors, their US market entry during 2020 has been a masterclass of adaptability: they adopted a two-pronged sales approach, combining direct sales and strategic partnerships.
With intentions to build out a strong business development, sales and onboarding team to conduct face-to-face interactions, the changed dynamics of the pandemic has given rise to new opportunities for their direct sales force. “Covid-19 has allowed us to pivot and offer something that people really need, particularly with real estate”, says Pippa Boothman, VP of Marketing and Communications. “We’ve really listened to the market and adapted accordingly. This means doubling down on helping customers in the areas of building insights and automation, particularly with regard to occupancy, energy efficiency, and cleaning. We’re currently running some pilots with some world recognized real estate and telecom partners to solve these challenges,” Boothman continued.
Their market momentum has also been fueled by a strategic partnership with Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. “We just launched a plug and play energy efficiency kit with them, called Mesa. It helps commercial building owners and tenants cut energy waste and cost,” added Boothman.
“This is such an important partnership for both parties. Sidewalks Labs wanted something innovative, easy to install and use, sustainable, that could fit anywhere, and offers energy efficiency. We were seeking a partner with shared vision and values, but also one with broad reach and access to potential customers and with Alphabet it doesn’t get any bigger” added Boothman.
The common thread between these two Alumni examples is that they have identified and leveraged 2 x important growth factors - their product-market fit and massive distribution - to give them better scale multiples in shorter periods of time. We believe they serve as great best practices for all other Nordic scale-ups preparing for- or embarking upon a mission of global expansion.
Image: Adeolu Eletu, Unsplash
Finding the Right Funding or Exit Strategies
Creating scale = accumulating market power
In our November 2019 Study of drivers of growth and barriers to scaling of Nordic companies[1], we outlined a finding that 85% of Nordic scaleups grow organically, with just 15% due to mergers and acquisitions. Even though different stages of scaling demand alternative capital strategies, there remains a strong tendency to default to scaling with capital intensive greenfield strategies.
In the current 2020 climate, Pitchbook analysts also speculate that exits will be delayed to alleviate downside valuation risk.[2] Listings will likely be postponed until market volatility settles down, and startups with cash flow issues could become acquisition targets.
Despite more pessimistic post-pandemic funding considerations in the current moment, it is still important for scale-ups to explore long-term exit strategies. Whether it is finding a larger company that can offer additional platforms and customer channels, acquiring a smaller startup with capabilities that will create new synergies, or selling to a private equity firm that specializes in taking companies global, there are a lot of possibilities for scale-ups, and one of the hardest decisions is choosing between these strategies.
There is variation in exactly how big a company will have to be when it chooses to pursue one of the strategies listed above. Ultimately, when it comes to non-organic growth such as with M&A, the following principles are the main considerations and decision-drivers:
- Create better synergies (capabilities/skills, performance and cost)
- Accelerate growth (market share: customers, revenue)
- Increase pricing power
- Eliminate competition
In the late-90’s, Nordic juggernaut Icon Medialab employed such tactics to accumulate more market power. “We knew that to accelerate our growth, globally, required buying the best competitors in local markets as opposed to a pure greenfield setup. So, we floated the company as a means to raise cash and create a currency of listed shares for our acquisition strategy,” said Erik Wikström, Co-Founder of Icon Medialab (today part of Digitas)
These same principles are as relevant today as they were back then. Two Nordic Scalers Alumni, TrademarkNow and Meniga, are examples of companies that recently leveraged an M&A strategy to reach more scale.
TrademarkNow
TrademarkNow provides an intelligent web-based trademark management platform that enables brand owners, marketing professionals, and trademark attorneys to make rapid investigations of more than 180 Patent Trademark Office (PTO) databases and a multitude of common law sources to avoid potential trademark conflicts.
They entered the Nordic Scalers program in 2018 with an ambition to find pathways to accelerate the distribution of their offering and increase market share. "It was great to learn from and benchmark against the other growth strategies within the Nordic Scalers group. These helped us to define our own path forward and to where we are today," said CEO and Co-Founder, Mikael Kolehmainen.
Through better marketing and sales strategies, they were able to grow their business by almost 100% one year later. Their ambition of accelerating market share took a new strategic direction recently, through their acquisition by Corsearch, a US based platform providing clearance and protection solutions for trademark and brand professionals. With the legal tech sector expecting some consolidation, the expertise and geographical reach of Corsearch combined with TrademarkNow’s machine learning stack makes them a formidable force in a highly competitive space.
As expected, priorities right now lie in integrating the two companies’ workstreams, by adopting the AI-enabled brand protection technologies introduced by TrademarkNow in other intellectual property fields within Corsearch’s realm of expertise. In an age where organizations evolve to be continuous creators of digital IP in addition to increased digitization of manual processes, AI-enabled DevOps platforms like TrademarkNow will only become more important to help them manage the complexities of today’s IT landscape.
“Joining forces with a larger platform with a similar mission will allow TrademarkNow to further provide instantaneous data in a secure, structured, and easy-to-use way,” added Kolehmainen.
Meniga
Fellow 2018 Nordic Scalers alumni company Meniga has also been very active in raising money for continued investment in R&D activities and global sales and service teams in order to meet growing demand. “Back in June, we announced a funding of €8.5 million in a “strategic investment,” led by Groupe BPCE, alongside Portugal’s Grupo Crédito Agrícola and long-standing strategic partner UniCredit,” said Co-Founder Viggo Asgeirsson.
It was their 2019 acquisition of Wrapp, however, which highlighted their ability to create a steeper trajectory of growth. According to Meniga, the acquisition established them as the leader in transaction-driven marketing within the Nordics, by matching merchants with consumers in a more effective manner than that offered by traditional marketing platforms such as Google and Facebook.
At the very least, it became clear that the acquisition created more synergies in the organisation and bolstered growth, adding just over €3M in annual recurring revenues. Strategically, the acquisition was well-timed, given the growing and competitive landscape of the fintech industry, and puts them on track to achieve their end-game of being in every corner of the globe.
“Our underlying mission has always been, and will continue to be, to help people lead better financial lives. Our products are already making an impact on 90 million banking customers across the world, and we are hoping to reach the 100 million mark in the very near future. To achieve this, we are looking to carry on growing our company and expanding to new markets, in order to help even more banks around the world to improve their digital banking offering,” added Asgeirsson.
As a Harvard Business Review article[1] notes, scale economies are not necessarily rooted in operating efficiencies. Often, they arise through the accumulation of market power. After eliminating competitors, the big players can charge higher prices for value delivered. This remains true and should serve as a valuable piece of advice for any ambitious scale-up company.
About this publication
Mapping of lithium-ion batteries for vehicles
A study of their fate in the Nordic countries
Lisbeth Dahllöf, Mia Romare and Alexandra Wu
ISBN 978-92-893-xxxx-x (PDF)
ISBN 978-92-893-xxxx-x (ONLINE)
http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/temanord2020-XXX
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© Nordic Council of Ministers 2020
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