Our Speakers

Ville Sointu is the Chief Strategist for digital currencies at Nordea Bank. With a career spanning since 2002 in fintech, Ville has held pivotal roles globally, innovating in financial services and connected devices. His expertise is recognized in influential circles, including the European Central Bank’s former Digital Euro Market Advisory Group, the board of Mobey Forum and the advisory board of GSMA’s Inclusive Tech Lab. Ville has also contributed to a number of key industry and policy organizations like the EBF, OECD and EBA and in his free time enjoys co-hosting the ‘Fintech Daydreaming’ podcast, sharing his insights into fintech’s evolving landscape.

Bio Annet Steenbergen After many years working in international border management Annet co-founded/co-initiated the Aruba Happy Flow project in 2013 that created the world’s first seamless passenger facilitation uniting the public and private stakeholder at the airport in one identity management system using a single biometric token. Ever since digital Identity and innovation for the travel eco-system have been at the centre of her work. She is currently a consultant for the travel and tourism industry and works on projects with focus on implementing digital identity and digital travel credentials to create true Seamless Travel while preserving data privacy and data protection. She is a participant in the EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium. Annet has been actively involved in IATA OneID working groups and task forces and in 2020 she was awarded the Women in Biometrics Award. She is also often asked as a public speaker and moderator.

Manuel Sandhofer is the General Manager, EMEA and Brazil at Wise Platform, Wise’s global payments infrastructure for banks, financial institutions and enterprises around the world. With over 15 years of experience in financial technology and payments, Manuel leads and scales Wise Platform’s strategic partnerships, growth, and commercial strategy across EMEA and Brazil including the partnerships with Monzo, N26 and Nubank. Prior to joining Wise, he built out the European Commercial function at Nium and held senior roles at Payoneer and UniCredit.

Laura Robertson is the Head of Partnerships – Benelux at Wise Platform, Wise’s global payments infrastructure for banks, financial institutions and enterprises around the world. With ten years of experience in the financial services sector, Laura is responsible for scaling and shaping the partnerships and go to market strategy for Wise Platform’s solutions across Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. Prior to Wise, Laura worked at Visa, Currencycloud and JPMorgan in London and Singapore.

A product leader with many years of experience in transforming complex machine-learning solutions into market-changing products. Geo combines deep technical expertise in biometrics and AI with strategic business acumen to deliver impactful innovations in identity verification. At Veriff, Geo leads the Biometric product development and strategy. His comprehensive understanding of biometric technologies—from facial recognition to liveness detection—enables him to create solutions that balance regulatory compliance with cutting-edge innovation.

With 7.5 years of experience in the technology industry and 3.5 years specialising in payments, Tarun leads cloud cost optimisation initiatives and built an internal platform to scale payment transactions with high reliability and optimised infrastructure costs, and is now leading the development of a payments cost observability platform for enterprise merchants across Europe and the US. He loves solving problems at scale and is deeply motivated by complex, high-impact systems. Tarun finds payments a fascinating domain due to its global relevance and structural complexity, and is passionate about building intelligence-driven, modern technology solutions that make payments simpler, smarter, and strategically aligned with merchant growth.

At Moonrise, our mission is to simplify access to local Nordic payments and accounts, empowering fintechs, PSPs and other financial institut.

Moonrise, a payments banking service powered by Lunar, is built to help global financial institutions and payment firms scale seamlessly across the Nordics. Launched in 2023, Moonrise provides regulated access to local accounts, domestic clearing, and real-time payment infrastructure in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Since its launch, Moonrise has onboarded over 17 partners, including global platforms such as CurrencyCloud, PPRO, Trustly, and Wise, cementing its position as the go-to partner for embedded finance across the region.