Fintech & Innovation

Fintech & Startups Tour

Discover Oslo's emerging fintech cluster — the startups, coworking spaces, and accelerators reshaping how Scandinavia thinks about money.

A five-million-person country that abolished cash faster than anywhere on earth — and built the payment rails, the trust, and the startups to prove it.

50 min

2.4 km

5 stops

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5 stops

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1Industry POI

Mesh — Oslo's Startup Hub

Mesh is one of Scandinavia's leading coworking and startup communities, housing hundreds of founders, developers, and investors under one roof. Its location in central Oslo reflects the city's ambition to build a startup ecosystem capable of competing with Stockholm and Copenhagen — and increasingly, it is succeeding.

Why it matters

One address, most of the seed ecosystem: for corporate venture teams and investors, a single afternoon at Mesh delivers more qualified deal flow per hour than a week of scheduled meetings in a larger capital.

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2Industry POI

Schibsted — Media Turned Tech Investor

Schibsted began as a 19th-century newspaper publisher and transformed itself into one of Europe's most successful digital marketplaces. Its Oslo campus houses a product and engineering organisation that has spun out several fintech ventures. Schibsted's story is a template for how legacy companies can reinvent themselves through technology investment.

Why it matters

Schibsted is the reference case for legacy-to-digital transformation in Europe: a newspaper house that built and spun out marketplace businesses now worth multiples of its original media assets. Boards planning their own digital pivots study this playbook first.

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3Industry POI

Vipps — Norway's Payment Revolution

Vipps, launched in 2015 by DNB, became Norway's dominant mobile payment platform within three years — used by over 4 million Norwegians in a country of 5 million. The product's rapid adoption reflects Norway's unusually high digital trust, strong smartphone penetration, and a banking sector willing to cannibalise its own revenue in pursuit of platform dominance.

Why it matters

Norway runs on shared bank-built rails — BankID for identity, Vipps for payments — with cash below a few percent of transactions. Any consumer-facing market entry must integrate with these rails, and any payments strategist should study how incumbents here chose platform dominance over protecting fee income.

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4Industry POI

Oslo Fintech Hub

Established with support from Finance Norway and Oslo municipality, Oslo Fintech Hub is the official meeting point between established financial institutions and challenger startups. It hosts regulatory sandboxes, investor introductions, and accelerator programmes — and is becoming a model for how traditional financial centres can embrace disruption rather than resist it.

Why it matters

For regulated-product ventures, this is the front door: Finanstilsynet's sandbox, incumbent partnerships, and investor introductions run through this community — and Norwegian regulators are unusually accessible when approached through it.

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5City Highlight

Youngstorget — Ideas Made Real

Youngstorget has long been Oslo's square of political ideas and civic organisation. Today the surrounding streets are filling with startup offices, venture funds, and innovation studios — a new kind of ambition replacing the old. The square itself still hosts public debates and market stalls, a reminder that the best innovation happens at the intersection of tradition and disruption.

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