Lasma Kuhtarska Biography: From Financial Analyst to Open Banking Pioneer

Academic Add-ons

Seeking stronger data skills, Kuhtarska enrolled in Harvard Business School’s online course called “Data Science for Business.” The class teaches how to turn raw payment numbers into clear actions, a lesson that keeps popping up in this Lasma Kuhtarska biography. The program shows students how to ask the right question, pick a simple model, test if it works, and explain the results in plain words so any team can use them. By focusing on clean data and clear goals, the course pushes a habit of making decisions with facts, not guesses.

Early Professional Roles

After graduating, Kuhtarska joined SEB Group in the Baltics as a financial analyst. SEB Group is a Swedish banking and financial services company. It runs retail and corporate banks in Sweden, the Baltics, and other Northern European markets. There she compared settlement speeds, fee structures and risk models across card networks and account-to-account methods. Colleagues recall her methodical approach: mapping each stakeholder’s cost and latency before proposing incremental fixes. The early work also satisfied the requirement that Lasma Kuhtarska, Latvian economist, understand both local regulation and pan-European directives such as PSD2.

Founding Noda

In 2018  Lasma Kuhtarska teamed with software engineers and payments specialists as co-founder and later Chief Strategy Officer of Noda.

By 2025 Noda reported connections with over 2,000 banks in 28 jurisdictions. The network size, while impressive, is as notable as the platform’s design logic: a single integration point instead of country-by-country workarounds. This structural choice reflects Kuhtarska’s econometric roots, meaning to simplify variables to improve predictability. Lasma Kuhtarska’s Noda works to meet a basic merchant need, while at the same time simplifying the somewhat dizzying complexity of the backend. Onboarding might not be as instantaneous as “plug-and-play,” but it leans in that direction, thanks to a straightforward UX.

Industry Context

Open banking across Europe has matured from concept to infrastructure. Yet adoption remains uneven; merchants outside the EU core still rely heavily on cards. Kuhtarska’s public presentations highlight this gap and argue for incremental migration paths: parallel acceptance of cards and A2A payments, unified reconciliation dashboards, and transparent fee comparisons. Such proposals align with the cautious tone of this Lasma Kuhtarska biography, emphasising measured progress over headline-seeking disruption.

Regulators are working on new rules called PSD3 in the European Union and a fresh set of rules in the United Kingdom. The coming laws will likely ask payment companies to make their APIs faster, have clear backup plans if something breaks, and follow clearer steps for repeat payments. Companies that start checking their system speed now and set up good consent tools will spend less money fixing things later.

Tech trends are also changing payments. More firms are using machine learning to spot fraud and show each shopper the payment button they are most likely to use. Quick checks on live transaction data can cut down on false alarms. Simple, smart checkout pages can speed up the process for customers. As instant-payment networks grow across Europe, stores that point out faster money settlement and lower fees may win over people who still use cards just out of habit.

For observers of the UK and European payments landscape, the career of Latvian Lasma Kuhtarska as a strategist offers a case study in how analytical training, regulatory awareness, and incremental product design can converge to shape an international fintech platform without relying on overt promotional narratives.