#RVoSu — Holvi, Elina Räsänen
The Real Voices of Scale-up Series.
In 2011 Tuomas Toivonen and Kristoffer Lawson were tired of the time and effort that money management and business bureaucracy took up when running their small business. They launched Holvi, a Finnish fintech company that provides digital banking services for European entrepreneurs and freelancers.
We sat down with Elina Räsänen, VP of Marketing and Communications, to hear her views on building a sustainable business, establishing an international user base and empowering micro-entrepreneurs to do more.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Other than to make money, for what reason does Holvi exist?
We exist to serve micro-entrepreneurs and build a sustainable business ourselves. I think that every entrepreneur and startup employee wants to make the world a little bit better. So we set out to serve a market that was previously underserved and help entrepreneurs fulfil their potential. We want to take away the difficulties of business admin so that our customers can focus on building and growing something special.
Holvi has grown from 10 to ~100 people in 2.5 years. What challenges have you faced?
Growth itself is a challenge that needs to be addressed at every step of the growth. No one scales from 10 to 100 overnight but for us, it happened quite quickly. Everything we learned would work for us as a team of 20 didn’t work once we were 40. And everything that worked for us when we were a team of 40 did not work once we were 80. So the challenge has been scaling everything, (from the physical space we are in, the tools required and onboarding new team members), while keeping everyone on the same page and working towards the same goal.
We overcame the ‘growth challenge’ by being very transparent and informative. We also had to create some processes and look at the organisational structure.
At an early-stage company everyone is an end-to-end startup employee which means that you do what it takes to get the job done.
As we’ve grown, we’ve become more focused. So instead of hiring people to do a little bit of everything across the business, we’ve hired specialists to do just one part of the job and do it really well.
Holvi now operates across 4 markets in Europe. Did you have to alter your approach when entering new markets?
Yes and no. To some extent, we are building an online service that is similar across all markets because the problems, challenges, and worries micro-entrepreneurs face are quite universal. However, there are some country specific things and in the markets we currently operate in everything is in the local language, so there is a certain degree of localisation.
Can you tell us about your partnership with Estonia’s E-residency programme?
We were in conversation with the E-residency team ~3 years ago when they were just establishing the programme. They were looking for a digital banking partner to serve their E-residents and there was a strong match in terms of vision. They are a borderless nation, we are a borderless bank, and we both want to democratise finance worldwide.
The E-residency programme is a world first which makes it very exciting. It was a big jump into the unknown but it was too attractive not to tag along. We are a small fintech company from Finland but through the programme, we can open accounts for remote workers anywhere in the world. We’re learning as we go and it’s going well, we now serve a significant percentage of all E-resident entrepreneurs.
What are Holvi’s 5–10 year goals?
We want to be Europe’s number 1 service for micro-entrepreneurs and provide entrepreneurship as a service for all of the freelancers and founders in Europe. By entrepreneurship as a service I mean bring more contextual knowledge about managing business finances and general entrepreneurship through our online community and offline workshops.
Listen to the full podcast here.
To learn more about Holvi, click here. To learn more about the Real Voices of Scale-up series, click here.
