Nordigen

"Data is the bread and butter of the companies we work for, and banks in particular," says Rolands. "Without data, banks would not be able to provide financing services, and it's always been that way. We build algorithms and then the financial institutions use them to work with their data. Our algorithm is the know-how, it's not really the data. If data movement is a gold rush, we're making the shovels."

"The main question is: does the data analysis benefit the end user or not?" says Roberts, "There are certainly cases in the news at the moment where data is abused, but what we do – it may sound idealistic – but we help people not to make wrong decisions. For example, it's not good for someone who can't pay back a loan to get a loan."

While friends in the financial sector assured them that banks already had all the cutting-edge know-how and analytics they could possibly want, the Nordigen pair quickly discovered this was not necessarily the case.

"We relentlessly knocked on doors until people let us in. Meetings led to more meetings and financial technology as a movement was really taking off. The banks started to see that new, young companies could bring new value and we became quite good at selling stuff to them – sometimes before it was built!" says Rolands.

Now Nordigen is on a rapid growth path. More than 50% of business is already export-oriented, a figure that is likely to rise to more than 90% by the end of 2019. The core business is working with large financial institutions and with a finite number of those in the Baltic states, larger markets are being targeted. The company is already doing well in Spain and Poland with Sweden and Finland also starting to generate numbers and the UK, Germany and Australia beckoning.