A map is usually the thing you consult when you are lost. Simon Schou discovered that it could also make people come looking for you. Copenhagen Fintech had begun counting and classifying Denmark’s financial technology startups. Then something useful happened: new companies approached the organisation because they wanted to appear on its map. An exercise in keeping track had become an invitation to join in.
“This might be our best kept business secret,” Schou said in 2021. There is a pleasing modesty to that particular secret. No mysterious algorithm. No velvet rope. Just the prospect of being visible alongside other people trying to build something. The map made a scattered industry easier to recognise, including for the people inside it.
Today Schou is Copenhagen Fintech’s co-founder, chief innovation officer and deputy CEO. His work involves partnerships, innovation projects and international connections. But that small episode is a good introduction to the job: arranging the conditions in which other people can find one another. A founder needs customers, expertise and access. Schou has spent much of his career working on the distance between them.
Before the startups, the geography
Schou studied at Roskilde University from 1996 to 2002, specialising in clusters and regional innovation systems. His master’s background combines geography and economics. It is a useful pairing for someone whose subsequent work would turn on a deceptively simple question: why do useful things happen in some places, and how can more of them happen there?
A cluster brings companies, knowledge and institutions into proximity. On paper, that can look terribly orderly. In practice, people have different deadlines, incentives and definitions of success. A university researcher, a bank executive and a startup founder can share an interest in technology while needing very different things from a conversation. Schou’s education supplies a revealing backdrop to his later career, without requiring a heroic conversion story.
By 2012 he was working as a consultant at Finansforbundet, Denmark’s financial services union. His subject then included helping IT employees gain project management skills and a better understanding of financial business. The concern was practical: technical workers needed opportunities to develop the capabilities employers were asking for. Before his work became closely associated with new companies, it already involved the future of people working inside established ones.
Different needs. A reason to meet.
Forty-five people and a weekend
In 2015, Schou helped establish Startup Weekend Finance Copenhagen with Copenhagen Fintech Innovation and Research, known as CFIR. The format gave participants 54 hours to work on possibilities for new financial businesses. Forty-five people took part; 100 guests attended the final presentation. A weekend is a mercifully short time in which to discover whether an idea can survive contact with other people.
The event is a concrete marker in a history that otherwise risks dissolving into words such as innovation and collaboration. Here were actual participants, a deadline and an audience. Schou’s publicly listed project describes an attempt to get financial entrepreneurship happening, rather than merely discussing its desirability.
The institutional work had a longer runway. In a 2019 interview, he traced the earlier organisation back to a publicly funded project established in 2009, followed by an association in 2013 and a national financial IT innovation network. That account gives Copenhagen Fintech a prehistory of research, funding structures and organisational experiments. The eventual hub emerged from years of trying ways to connect finance, technology and knowledge.
A deadline gives an idea something to push against.
An opening door, then a difficult conversation
Copenhagen Fintech was established in 2016, with the financial services union, the banking industry and Copenhagen’s municipality among its founding forces. The Lab opened that October. By December 2017, Schou was reporting that more than 50 small fintech businesses had moved in. A place intended to bring people together was acquiring the most useful evidence of demand: people arriving.
His position put him between companies often described as natural enemies. Startups were supposed to disrupt banks. Banks were supposed to resist. Schou’s account of their relationship was more interesting. In 2020, he described increasing alignment between young and established businesses, with collaborations and jobs following from it. He singled out the productive combination of rebellion and institutional experience.
That left a difficult problem intact. An idea could lose its original energy on the way to market. Financial institutions also had obligations to stability and organisation. His comments acknowledged both pressures. Anyone can enjoy a bright idea at a demonstration; keeping it useful through implementation is a less theatrical occupation. It suits a career built around making connections hold after the introductions are over.
The ambition travels beyond Copenhagen
A local address can conceal an international job. Schou has led delegations and ecosystem collaborations across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, including connections with Singapore, Israel, Silicon Valley and New York. His work takes the Copenhagen community into places where a promising Danish company may still have to explain who it is, why it matters and whom it needs to meet.
He is also willing to distinguish access from practical assistance. Discussing internationalisation in a 2022 interview, he explained that a partnership with Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was intended to give fintech companies local knowledge and contacts in overseas markets. The same account records his view that the market-entry support had not fully met his expectations. A programme’s existence and a founder’s useful experience of it are separate tests.
There is a brisk lesson in that dissatisfaction. An itinerary can be full while a company’s next step remains unclear. Schou was looking for people on the ground who understood the market and could make direct connections. The geography in his professional background returns here with a commercial edge: different places require knowledge that cannot be packed into a general presentation.
“But I get the feeling we’ve only just started.”
Simon Schou · 2022
When the customer has no bank account
One collaboration carried that question a long way from the Nordic financial industry. In March 2018, Copenhagen Fintech and CARE Denmark joined forces around access to financial services. The problem included nomadic communities in Niger with limited connectivity and few banking options. The challenge asked fintech businesses to apply their capabilities to people who could not easily access cash or loans.
Nine proposals came forward. The selected concept, from hiveonline, proposed a blockchain-enabled mobile wallet network. A €13,500 award supported development of a proof of concept. Those particulars matter: this was a defined problem, a selection process and support for a proposed solution. They do not turn a proposal into a claim that the entire problem was solved.
Schou’s role was to help connect a community of technology companies with an organisation that understood a different set of needs. In a 2019 podcast conversation, he and colleague Oliver Sjöstedt discussed the collaboration with CARE’s Rasmus Jacobsen and hiveonline’s Sofie Blakstad. The cast itself explains the appeal of his work. People who possess different parts of an answer get a reason to sit down together.
Success, measured after the applause
By 2022, Schou had a straightforward question for the companies attracting attention: how much difference did they make in their markets? He pointed to familiar conveniences such as Pleo’s expense tools and MobilePay, alongside services helping businesses with payments and financial data. His interest in small and medium-sized companies gave fintech a purpose beyond the internal concerns of financial institutions.
He also noticed a change in who wanted to become an entrepreneur. Experienced employees were leaving comfortable corporate positions to build businesses. Students’ ambitions were changing. The Danish television programme Løvens Hule had helped make startup language part of ordinary conversation. Schou’s account had room for that cultural detail alongside investors and academic institutions. An industry needs people who can imagine joining it.
His description of a functioning community included the possibility of returning after a successful exit. That is a revealing measure of continuity. A place becomes more useful when experience can circulate back through it, when a person’s next company or investment starts with relationships formed during the previous attempt. The work of convening therefore extends well beyond the day somebody first signs up.
The next conversation is already under way
In May 2025, Schou was listed as moderator for a Nordic fintech session at Point Zero Forum in Zurich, with representatives from Trust Stamp Denmark and Partisia Blockchain. The theme involved trust, transparency and sustainability. Later that year, his international work included attending Quantum Korea in Seoul through the DK QIS-Net project, alongside partners including DTU, KAIST, KPMG and the Danish Foreign Ministry.
The Korean visit also included meetings with Toss Bank, Korea Fintech Center and Korea Fintech Association. Quantum technology and fintech shared space on the itinerary. The organisation’s account even allowed itself a Gangnam Style joke. Diplomatic and technical networking apparently leaves a little room for the cultural attractions of the neighbourhood.
In 2026, Copenhagen Fintech marks ten years. Its anniversary account puts renewed emphasis on connecting research with entrepreneurship through the Nordic Fintech Center. Schou’s teaching and speaking work, including executive education contributions at Copenhagen Business School, sits comfortably beside that ambition. The recurring question in his career concerns how specialised knowledge becomes something another person can use.
The map was an early, wonderfully economical answer. Give people a place to appear, and some will introduce themselves. The harder work begins after that: making the next introduction relevant, helping an idea reach a market and persuading people to return. For Schou, the career has accumulated around those encounters. There is always another company to meet, and another reason to redraw the map.
Keep the conversation going
More of Schou’s work, ideas and conversations.