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GFTN's Senior Advisor for Europe, Matthias Kröner asserts that the industry's obsession with financial inclusion misses a harder question of readiness for the products that follow. He also names Europe's real FinTech bottleneck as scale rather than regulation, while dismissing run-of-the-mill AI chatbots in favour of real innovations like deposit tokenization.
By GFTN Editorial Team
Matthias Kröner has spent over 25 years shaping the European FinTech landscape: he co-founded two digital banks before moving into web3 with Tradelite Solutions.
Bridging GFTN’s global conversations in Europe, Kröner dedicates much of his time and effort on the circuit. He will speak at the 10th edition of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen on 23–24 September 2026 - an event that's become an annual fixture on his calendar. Ahead of his session there, we asked him about the industry he's spent his career trying to rebuild.
Financial inclusion is the buzzword. Financial readiness is what truly matters.
Kröner firmly believes that people must be equipped to manage their finances before they're included in the system. He has a simple analogy: "You wouldn't hand your teenager the keys to a race car with no licence and no lessons. In finance we do exactly that, in the name of sales targets, and call it progress."
He explains how "A VC-funded lending app rolling out to millions across the Global South will be celebrated as inclusion. But if someone isn't ready for the product, being included might be the worst thing that can happen to them."
Watch our related podcast with Tamara Cook, Director, Office of the United Nations Secretary-General's Advocate for Financial Health: Reframing Financial Inclusion: From Access to Financial Health
Europe's scale problem, misplaced attention
When asked about Europe's central fintech challenge, Kröner lands on one word: scale.
He details how being funded means having investors for guidance and to answer to, and "Only a handful of challenger banks have truly broken through in Europe”, adding that “too many investors spoon-feed companies into a slow death."
In his view, "The real question isn't how to survive. It's what it takes to run a genuinely modern, fast-evolving back end while staying fully compliant.”
He also sees misplaced attention in the industry today. The wave of generative-AI chatbots banks are racing to launch is “being built on poor or the wrong data, and executives fool themselves that a handful of transactions can teach a model who a customer really is. It cannot."
The underrated opportunity is in the quiet tokenization of commercial bank deposits on shared ledgers. "Turn an ordinary bank balance into a programmable asset, and multinationals can settle across borders instantly, without counterparty risk. While everyone chases a flashy chatbot, the real winners are marrying blockchain speed to the safety and compliance of regulated banking."
Bridging European perspectives in global conversations
Munich-based Kröner cites a demographic fact Europe will have to acknowledge: "By 2035, ageing is no longer a forecast. It's the operating environment." By then, the industry's job will be to serve an older, innovation-averse society efficiently, with far fewer people.
His definition of success is quiet, structural and customer-centric. It's “when infrastructure is so good it becomes invisible – doing far more with far fewer people.”
He sees agentic AI as the industry's first real shot at living up to this ideal – to finally understand the customer, instead of just selling to them. "For the first time, AI gives us a real chance to actually understand the customer. It would be unforgivable to waste that on selling them more of what we already wanted to sell."
The same philosophy, from Munich to Copenhagen to Singapore
"Global networks have to connect locally. Think globally. Learn from each other. And, bring diverse voices into the same room."
Kröner will bring his European-centric perspectives and learnings - including from the latest Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen - to the Singapore FinTech Festival on 18 to 20 November 2026. Attendees can expect him to raise questions echoing directly back to his philosophy of European digital sovereignty, financing an ageing society, absorbing rising defence spending on top of already-stretched household and government debt.
