Kristoffer Lawson Leaving Holvi

Kristoffer Lawson, co-founder and head of product for Finnish banking startup Holvi, announced his departure from the company today.

Lawson wrote on his blog today, “Last week the decision was made that Holvi would reposition to focus on a set of core business areas with a change in the executive team. I will be leaving that team.”

Lawson co-founded Holvi in 2011 with Tuomas Toivonen and Teemu Hukkanen. Toivonen will take responsibility for product development, service operations and risk management. COO Johan Lorenzen will take the role of CEO. The company raised $360,000 of venture funding, according to Crunchbase.

The company went live with its services in Finland last year, and was poised to spread to other countries in northern Europe when Bank Innovation last spoke with Lawson last year. The company has been successfully launched in its pilot market of Finland, Toivonen said, and will now work toward scaling to launch in additional European markets. It seems the direction taken in this approach is what came between Lawson and the other stakeholders.

Holvi rose out of Lawson’s experience as a consultant and with his previous startup, Scred, a tool for managing a community’s money, functionality that was also built in Holvi. He described Holvi’s beginnings in this way:

[We] decided the only way to really get at where our ambitions had always lay was to essentially become a very new type of bank. That is the point where money comes in, money is stored, and money goes out. That’s the point where you can build the transaction machine for a future generation. An engaging, human-focused platform. One that would enable new activities.

This was how Holvi was born, and we followed by working day in, day out, to create this next generation of financial service. More importantly it was also born to solve our own problems, and the problems we perceived around us. Essentially, Holvi was formed as a banking service for creating and doing, and one where we early on decided to recruit for and invest heavily into the user experience.

Lawson is an original. (See his “business card” above for a small sample of his originality.) The fintech world will be watching for his next move with interest.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.