Bird & Bird's Nordic offices in Copenhagen and Helsinki have advised Holvi in the acquisition by multinational Spanish banking group, BBVA.
Holvi, a Helsinki based Fintech start-up, was founded in 2011, and describes its offering as "Banking for Makers and Doers" and as a "Payment Institution" rather than a traditional bank. Holvi provides entrepreneurs and SMEs with a regulated one-stop-shop to collect income, manage expense and to get an understandable real-time view of their company finances. Holvi offers a range of business services as well as traditional banking through its online platform. These include an online sales platform, an invoicing facility and a cashflow tracker. Holvi is an Authorised Payment Institution licensed and regulated by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Finland (FIN-FSA).
Bird & Bird lawyers Kimmo Reina (Helsinki) and Martin von Haller Grønbæk (Copenhagen) advised Holvi in the acquisition.
"Holvi was a tech startup coming out of the vibrant Nordic startup community. We were introduced to Holvi as a client through a Danish business angel that provided early stage funding for it. It has been a great journey with Holvi from early stage to becoming on of the first FinTech exits in the Nordic." - Martin von Haller Grønbæk
Holvi will continue to be run as a stand-alone business, and there will be a two-way flow of knowledge, ideas and support between Holvi and BBVA. The company will continue to be situated in Helsinki after the acquisition.
The acquisition comes just over two years after BBVA paid $117 million for Simple, a US based digital bank. Furthermore, BBVA acquired a 29.5 percent stake in Atom, the UK’s first digital-only lender in 2015. The Spanish banking group is buying into the future of banking by investing in these young, innovative companies.
