Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 40. Published 22 January 2026. Guest: Teemu Karuluoto, founder and CEO of Nocfo. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: When a startup wants to offer embedded banking, the usual playbook is pretty clear. Pick a banking as a service provider, integrate their APIs, and build your own front end. But Nocfo took a different route. They partnered with Holvi, a neobank targeting the exact same customers, and white labelled the entire banking product.
Today I'm speaking with Teemu Karuluoto, founder and CEO of Nocfo, a Finnish AI powered accounting platform with 3,000 active customers. Instead of building banking from scratch, they embedded Holvi's bank accounts and cards directly into the bookkeeping software, letting customers open an account during onboarding and pay invoices without ever leaving Nocfo.
In this conversation we explore why partnering with the neobank made more sense than going the BaaS route, how ICP alignment drove their partnership decision, and what it's really like to integrate banking when you don't have the resources to build everything yourself. We also discuss what features you can skip on day one, how open banking compares to a direct integration, and Nocfo's plans to bring this model to Germany.
My name is Lars Markull and this is the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. Every two weeks I interview the builders and shapers of embedded finance. And a quick reminder from my side. At Embedded Finance Review I publish weekly newsletters, biweekly podcasts, and host in-person and virtual industry events. You can find all of this on my website, embeddedfinancereview.com. In addition, I work with non-financial brands, infrastructure providers, and banks to understand, design and launch their embedded finance products. If you are interested in working with me, visit my website and please reach out. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Teemu, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Teemu Karuluoto: I'm good. Just busy days before Christmas, when we are recording this at the moment. And I'm located near Helsinki, and it's kind of warm and I'm missing the snow over here at the moment, but all good here.
Lars Markull: Nice to hear that. This is the second podcast I'm recording out of Mumbai over here. When we publish it later in January I'll be back in cold Berlin, and then listening to this podcast I'll remember what you said by then. Maybe we have snow as well, but today it's definitely not snow weather over here.
Teemu Karuluoto: Yeah. Let's hope that we have snow over here as well in January. If we don't, we're going to thank climate change for that.
What Nocfo does
Lars Markull: Indeed. Today we're going to dive into the whole topic of, let's call it, digital accounting meets embedded banking. The both of us connected a couple of months ago when I learned about the company and how you approached the problems or the pains of your customers in combining these two worlds, banking and accounting.
But before we dive into the whole banking side of things, maybe let's bring people up to speed. You are the founder and CEO of a company called Nocfo. Maybe you can give us a little bit of an elevator pitch, what the company exactly does, who you target, and what the pain points are you're solving for your customers.
Teemu Karuluoto: Yeah, sure. So Nocfo is an AI powered financial management platform that enables anyone to manage their bookkeeping themselves. Basically what we do, we try to automate the bookkeeping process as much as possible for small entrepreneurs, small businesses in general.
At the moment we work only in Finland, and in Finland we have 3,000 active customers at the moment, across different industries. But our ICPs are independent professionals and small business owners. And then in Finland we also have a bunch of treasurers, so associations, as our customers.
The core problem that we try to solve is managing accounting for small businesses by themselves, in the right way, AI powered. So that's basically what we're doing.