In this episode of the Connector Podcast, host Koen Vanderhoydonk reflects on the recent Nordic FinTech Week with guest Gustav Sahlman, CEO of Curity. The conversation centers on why identity has become a critical priority for fintechs and banks, especially as AI agents become more prevalent in customer interactions. Gustav explains Curity’s cloud‑native, deployment‑agnostic identity‑access‑management platform, emphasizing its ability to handle high‑volume, omnichannel flows for both human users and machine agents. They discuss the delicate balance between user experience, security, and regulatory compliance, highlighting trends such as passwordless authentication and passkeys. The duo also explores the challenges of global competition, wallet integration, and European data‑sovereignty concerns, noting that outsourcing identity can expose firms to risk. Looking ahead, they consider how AI reshapes expectations for software deployment, management, and UX, and they stress the need for standards (e.g., MCP) to enable safe AI capabilities while preserving data control. The episode closes with contact information for further dialogue.
Chapters
Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another Connector Podcast. And today we're going to reflect back on the Nordic Fintech Week a couple of weeks ago. And today with me, there is Gustaf, and you participated to the Fintech Week a couple of weeks ago. Is that correct?
Yes, very much so.
And how did you find the event?
Super interesting. I mean, we met up, you know, a lot of interesting fintech companies. Of course, I mean, a number of the banks, a number of the payment providers, but also a lot of interesting startups that are reshaping the way that we view fintech.
And did you take any key conversations with you or any trends that stayed with you?
I think, of course, it's very hard to not have a view on AI and the capabilities that enables our fintech businesses to do. So that's, of course, a key conversation. How do you allow agentic AI to engage with customers in a meaningful way? So that's a conversation that's really helpful. And of course, on the back of that, the European term sovereignty, how do you actually keep control over your data in a world where identity is really the key asset, which key asset for anything, but it's also potentially a kill switch. If you actually outsource your identity, you outsource your data. you leave yourself slightly vulnerable.
No, no, absolutely. And I cannot agree more with what you just said. I mean, that was definitely one of the takeaways for me as well. Now, I guess by talking about identity, it hovers nicely in talking a bit about you and your company. So I'm sorry that I didn't ask that in the very beginning, but Gustaf, can you maybe introduce yourself and also Curity, the company that you work for?
Sure. So my name is Gustav Sahlman, and I'm the CEO of Curity. And Curity is a— and by the way, I'm Swedish, and I've been running quite a few software companies started in different spaces, in the cybersecurity space, in the AI space, but now in the identity space. And Curity is a category leader in the world where companies have API-rich environments, lots of consumers, wants to build the omnichannel presence, maybe enrich that with having a strong agentic AI strategy to really get to customers in new and innovative ways while retaining control over the identity. So it's an identity technology provider in what's labeled the identity access management space, but primarily focusing on the external part, not on the internal, the workplace stuff. But rather on building a really strong user experience.
And in your opinion, because you already talked a lot about what the future will hold, but why has identity security become so urgent and so much of a high priority for fintechs and also financial institutions?
Because identity is really the key to enabling new types of services. You have to provide a user experience And this goes, it ripples through the whole business. It's from the initial phase when you want to, how do you maximize the customer conversion from the visitor that comes onto a site? How do you make sure that you actually get maximum conversion of these? Is there a different type of user flow that should be adapted, whether it's a teenager accessing your site or whether it's a retired citizen? And that goes, how do you do churn prevention? everything, how do you make sure that the identity and that the information is kept securely? Everything is really— identity is the silver bullet behind a successful digital venture. Knowing your customer, keeping good, providing strong access, that is really the key behind a successful fintech venture. And on the back of that, if you have a strong technology solution in the identity space. You can deploy new services very rapidly. There's no— you can minimize lead time and you can, you know, make that in a cohesive and coherent fashion, you know. So that's— it's really the engine behind, uh, and especially in the fintech market. If you talk about banks, you have lots of, you know, you have your AML, you have your KYC process, you have lots of different regulatory requirements on how you deal with customer data, how do you make sure that you know your customer. All of that has to happen in the background while not impacting the user experience. User experience is absolutely key. Strong technology, identity technology solution will enable a really smooth customer journey while you can actually comply, do all the things that you by law and by good sound business practices are required to undertake.
No, I agree. But what makes you stand out against the others? I mean, there's obviously a lot of identity providers in the market, but what is your— how is your approach different in terms of solutions that you bring to the market?
It's built— first of all, I think, you know, we are a technology company and we've built this in a cloud-native technology, meaning that it's, you know, It's built in a very modern fashion, meaning that it's built for dealing with very large volumes. It's very many different user flows, whether those are from humans or non-humans, whether that's actual consumers or if it's machines or agentic AIs or whatever it may be. It's all built for that. It's built for purpose. And the fact that it's cloud-native also means that it's deployment agnostic. You can run it on-prem, you can run it in a private cloud, you can run it in a public cloud, you can run it as a managed service, you can run it in different shapes, forms. And that deployment flexibility is really, really powerful. And for us, many of our competitors, they're pure-play sort of SaaS vendors where it's, you have to sort of, you have to use the templated fashion which they've come up with. You have to trust their ability to maintain data privacy. You have to rely on their ability to actually have the services up and running. And for us, you want to be free. You want to have a strong solution. You want to make sure that you can launch services really, really quickly with the security required while you can sort go from one day to the other and say, we need to run it in a public cloud or in a private cloud, or that freedom is quite valuable.
Gustav, I'm very happy that all your replies and answers are coming from a place where you put the client in the center. And I think that's also the right way to do it. But How would you actually marry the facts with customer experience versus privacy versus regulation? It's a very sensitive triangle. So could you maybe give some examples how it has been achieved?
Yeah, I mean, there's several, if I say, very important trends which we fully support, like passwordless. How do you make sure that you use biometrics, for example, if that is— and you can incorporate that into the user flow? Because everything, everything, you're running a digital entity, whether that's in the, for that matter, if it's in the fintech space, in the banking space, or for that matter, if you would be in the retail space or any other space, you know, minimizing the number of clicks, minimizing user friction, having a, you can never have security at the expense of user experience. You should, could say, you know, you, we want to maximize security, maximize flexibility without impacting the user experience. User experience can never be— you have to make use of all the different tools in the toolbox to make sure that the user flow is optimal. And passwordless is— passkeys is really— it's a good example of how the user experience becomes less and less strenuous, if I put it that way.
Yeah, exactly.
Security can never be at the expense of the user experience.
I'm glad you bring up passkeys because this is obviously a very international effort done in the industry, but there's always also a lot of European regulations. If a fintech would be expanding externally, internationally, What would be the sort of key aspirations you need to have from the start? And have you maybe known about failures that are very often being done and how that potentially could be prevented?
I think the perspective of to make sure that you think about the user experience in every aspect of this is actually, you have to make sure that you're competitive against— we're competing on a global arena. We cannot ever sort of make do and say we're the best within a certain region. We have to make sure that we're best in the world. That applies to us as a technology vendor. That applies to our customers. They have to make sure that— because even if you run currently a regional or local business, you have to assume that that's going to be under global competition. So it comes, for example, when you think about the wallet, Now we have the European wallets structure.
Yeah.
Of course, I mean, from a consumer perspective, that has to be taken in consideration. How does Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, how does Apple Pay, et cetera, work? You have to make sure that everything, you can never allow yourself to be complacent for the global competition. You have to make sure that it is as seamless as frictionless as the best. And I don't know, I don't want to point fingers and say, you know, this should have been done this way or that should have been done that way, but always have the user as the focal point. Make sure that the solutions that you develop are best in class.
Well, looking towards the future in terms of identity access management, What are the challenges that you look at and how are you preparing your company to stay ahead of the game?
Of course. I mean, we— and this is back to one of the original statements. If you look at the, I would say, the transformation of the software landscape that is happening on the back of AI, I mean, you can have all types of perspectives on this. How How much will it do in practice? What will it mean? But I think one of the fundamental aspects of it is the expectation of how software should operate. The AI brings about a new set of expectations. It should be super easy to deploy. It should be super easy to manage. The user experience will be redefined. The way that you communicate, whether it's through Perplexity or ChatGPT or whatever it may be, Yeah. It's a very, very user-oriented UX. And that same type of—
Probably never been so human as it is at the moment, isn't it?
Exactly. It's human while it's not human. It's super interesting.
I agree.
And that is going to be— it's a transformational force that's going to affect us as an identity provider. And of course, it's going to affect the way that we deal with when you set up new flows to deal with not just how the humans should interact with the technology, but rather how the non-humans should interact with the technology and with the brands. Traditionally, you could say in the identity space, it was like authentication. You would log into a system maybe a few times a year. That's not how it is now. You would need to interact with the consumer, whether it's a machine or a an actual human being lots of times. It's going to be much more pressure on the backend technology, on the identity technology that serves these machines or these human beings or whatever it is. It's a fabulous new world where I think technology is going to look and feel a lot different.
And also maybe the new world, will sort of make us forget important things from the past. I mean, you, you named Perplexity. Perplexity came out with Comet, the browser.
Yeah.
They said in the statement that the data that you actually put on Comet will be used for further training purposes.
Yeah.
And there's people that actually don't mind to do it because of the user experience. So I, I'm following you 100%, Gustav, because that's where we forget. We're putting the data out because it's made so easy for us.
And then that sort of ties into this sort of, you know, actually sovereignty. You know, which data do you want to share? Which data do you not want to share? Which data do you need to keep, you know, by yourself? And which data is it okay to sort of train? But, you know, you see, I think, you know, we're going to see many more implementations using like, you know, standards like MCP and so forth, which really opens the floodgates to a whole new set of AI capabilities, which I think are going to be absolutely necessary for our customers, for the banks, fintechs, whatever you may— payment providers, etc. They will need to adapt to that world. That's just how it is. And hopefully we can be an enabler to make sure that they stay competitive in this world while keeping the customer data safe and sound at the same time.
I agree. And I think this might also be a good moment to sort of come to an end of this podcast because we're at the pinnacle point where it's clear we've got a lot of things to talk in the future, a clear problem statement ahead of us. The only question for me remaining is, Gustav, if people want to continue these conversations, how do they get to you?
I'd love to continue the discussion because I don't think it's a— I'd love to continue that discussion. And they can reach me through, maybe best through, send me an email on gustav.sahman@kunstnernachrichten.at. Single N for those German speakers that tend to put in 2 Ns at the end, @gmail.com.
Okay. I'm glad I don't have to give you mine because my last name is very long.
Your email must be a little bit complicated.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I would love if you shoot me an email and I'd love to keep the conversation going.
Excellent. Thank you very much for being here in our podcast. Thank you also to the audience for staying tuned. Please stay Stay here because more news will come from the fintech industry. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks for listening to another episode of The Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
