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GFTN's Europe Managing Partner Matthias Kröner asserts that the industry's obsession with financial inclusion misses a harder question of readiness. He also names Europe's real FinTech bottleneck as scale rather than regulation, while dismissing the AI chatbot hype in favour of real innovations like deposit tokenization.
By GFTN Editorial Team
Matthias Kröner is GFTN’s Managing Partner for Europe. He has spent over 25 years shaping the European FinTech landscape; co-founding two digital banks, then moving into web3, starting up Tradelite Solutions.
Bridging GFTN’s global conversations in Europe, Kröner dedicates much time and effort on the global circuit. He is speaking 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."
He asserts that "readiness has to come before inclusion. Otherwise we're not including people, we're setting them up to be excluded for life."
Watch our podcast: Reframing Financial Inclusion: From Access to Financial Health
Europe's scale problem
Asked about Europe's central fintech challenge, Kröner lands on one word: scale.
Scale is ultimately a function of funding. Being funded means having investors for guidance and to answer to. He unpacks this, explaining that "only a handful of challenger banks have truly broken through, and only three of them are German — N26, Trade Republic, Raisin.”
In his opinion, “too many investors spoon-feeding companies into a slow death." He goes on to say that "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”.
That same instinct – looking past the obvious story to what's actually happening underneath – shapes his read on where the industry's attention is misplaced 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."
What’s underrated is 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 the flashy chatbot, the real winners are marrying blockchain speed to the safety and compliance of regulated banking."
Bridging European perspectives in global conversations
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.
Led by the same structural instincts, his definition of success is quiet, structural and customer-centric. That is “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 network 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 to the Singapore FinTech Festival in November. You can expect him to raise questions that echo directly back to his philosophy of European digital sovereignty, financing an ageing society, absorbing rising defence spending on top of already-stretched household and bloating government debt.
