Olly Richards, SVP Commercial & Strategy at 10x Banking, explains what Nordic banks can learn from Spotify and IKEA: build a global product, then adapt for each market. The trade-off banks face between regional fit and global scale is usually a limit of their core banking system, not of banking, and the next core decision can remove it.
The Nordics has produced some of the most well-known brand names in the world, from Spotify and Klarna to IKEA and LEGO. Known by billions around the world, all of them originated from a region of just 28.3 million people. Their success is usually told as a story about Nordic innovation culture. But it is also a story about how constraints can act as a creative catalyst. The size of the Swedish, and indeed the Nordic, market means these countries could not stay domestic if they wanted to grow. So they built for a world market before they needed one.
The model that made them such a success was to build one product that works almost everywhere and adapt it for individual markets, rather than making a choice between global scale and local fit. Spotify, for example, founded in Stockholm in 2006, built a single app for the whole world and listed in New York in 2018. Meanwhile, Sweden's Klarna has held a banking licence in Sweden since 2017 and only listed in New York in 2025.
You might be wondering at this stage: what does all this have to do with financial services? Nordic banks face the same market-size challenge as these companies, but their ability to build for growth in the same way has been somewhat limited in the past by beliefs about the constraints of core banking technology that, while once well-founded, are no longer the case.
Why one banking platform can’t look the same across the region
Despite being some of Europe's most efficient banks, financial institutions in the region have had to compromise, moving back and forth between centralising for scale and localising for each market, and some have pulled out of neighbouring countries altogether.
This oscillation stems from the different market characteristics in those countries.
In Sweden, households focus on investing: they keep 19% of their financial assets in bank deposits, against 42% across the EU, and 11% in listed shares, against 6% in the EU, and 73% of Swedes have private fund savings.
In Denmark, households focus on saving: they held a record DKK 1,294bn in bank deposits in April 2026, and deposits make up around 52% of what they hold combined with securities.
Also relevant is the behaviour of markets bordering the Nordics. In Estonia, one of the Baltic markets where Swedbank runs one of its four home banks, households keep 63% of their financial assets in deposits, three times the Swedish share.
The limits of technology are not the laws of banking
Across the Nordic market, it is a common belief that the technology behind a bank decides which of these customers they can serve well. For a decade, these banks have reorganised as if this were an immutable law of banking, rather than simply a limit of their core banking technology.
On legacy and even neo-core systems, each product is built into the software itself. To offer a different savings account in Denmark or a different fund product in Sweden, the bank has to change the code, test it and release it separately for each market. That leaves two options. A bank that runs one shared system across the region keeps costs down but gives every market the same products. A bank that runs separate versions for each market can offer local products but pays to build and maintain each one.
For a decade, these banks have reorganised as if this were an immutable law of banking, rather than simply a limit of their core banking technology.
Modern cores, by contrast, keep product rules separate from the processing engine, so one platform can run Danish deposit products and Swedish investment products with different rules in each market – making the trade-off no longer a fact of banking. On a core where products are configured for each market, the same programme can cut costs and still give investors, savers and depositors the products they use.
LEGO shows what that can look like. It makes its bricks in six factories on three continents, each close to its market, and a brick made today still fits one from 1958. Banking is not LEGO, but the principle holds: build your core to a single standard, with each market's products built on top. This matters for Nordic banks because they need to build globally and adapt locally if they’re to scale effectively.
The constraint Nordic banks can surpass
Spotify, Klarna, IKEA and LEGO could not change the size of their home market, so they built for the world from the start. Nordic banks started from the same small market, but the limit they hold themselves to was never due to size. It was the core system, and a bank gets to choose its core.
That makes the next IT modernisation decision one that impacts both domestic and global growth. Before signing off a new core, every bank board should ask one question: does this platform still force us to choose between regional fit and global scale?
If the answer is yes, the bank is not modernising. It is buying another decade of the same trade-off, in a region that has already shown the world it doesn't have to make it.