A blog series exploring stock market life from a listed company CEO’s perspective
“Not everyone in town was a fan of that comment of yours”
At the end of 2020, about a year before Inderes’ own listing, I gave an interview to Arvopaperi in which I criticised high listing costs by comparing them to exchanging currency at the airport. Naturally, that ended up in the headline, and I got some feedback afterwards. Someone may well take offence at this blog post too.
Arvopaperi headline: “Mikael Rautanen wants to take Inderes public, but criticises listing costs: ‘Even at the airport you can exchange money more cheaply’”
The problem of listing costs is one that we companies have raised ourselves. In the previous blog post, I wrote about Siili Solutions’ bold 2012 listing, which brought First North back to life in Finland. What I left out was that Siili’s listing costs were EUR 217,000. Today, even in small listings, costs below EUR 800,000 are becoming a rarity, although offering sizes have also grown considerably. Most recently, in the August 2026 issue of Arvopaperi (in Finnish, behind a paywall), recently listed companies described how listing projects feel unnecessarily heavy and involve commissioning a lot of documentation that does nothing for the company. Something in the ecosystem has gone wrong.
If the barriers to listing, such as high costs and too much bureaucracy, could be lowered, there would probably be more listings. At least the European Commission believes so, having put rescuing Europe’s languishing public capital market on its agenda. For example, the EU Listing Act, adopted in 2024, aims to make raising capital and listing on the stock exchange easier and cheaper for companies in the European Union. At the same time, the pie would grow for all advisors and the capital market would become more competitive. So far, there has been a lot of talk on the subject at EU level, but fairly little action. Except here in the Nordics, where Finland and Sweden are among the few countries where the number of listed companies has grown over the past decade. And the advisory ecosystem’s pie along with it.
Not everyone shares the vision of a bigger pie through a lower threshold. An advisor once remarked that “in a listing, the client has their wallet wide open”. The client rarely knows exactly what they are buying, and failure isn’t really an option. Listing costs are reported in the income statement as non-recurring items, and the final bill is settled “out of the capital raised”. So the cost doesn’t really show up directly anywhere, even though it is shareholders’ money. An unreasonably large final bill can send investors a signal about how management and the board handle shareholders’ money.
The comment got on my nerves, because it reflects an attitude of milking clients rather than getting better. I don’t believe it represents the mainstream among advisors, but it was very much on my mind when I made the currency exchange comment. What if we set out to make Finland the country with the most efficient listing process in Europe?
What does listing cost in Finland?
We collected data on 37 listings on the Helsinki stock exchange between 2020 and H1/2026. A few companies are missing from the data because their listing materials had been removed from their investor pages, in breach of the regulatory requirement to keep them available for 10 years (AD: if you buy an IR website solution from Inderes, our team takes care of your site’s regulatory compliance for you). We also left out technical listings for the sake of comparability.
In the 37 listings, a total of EUR 993 million was raised, and including share sales, EUR 1,963 million of capital changed hands. The companies paid EUR 99.9 million in costs and the selling shareholders EUR 38.6 million. The advisors’ total pie was therefore EUR 139 million.
Combined costs were thus 10.1% of the capital raised, with individual listings ranging from 5% to 25%. Relative to the capital raised, First North companies pay clearly less in costs than main market listings: 8.3% vs. 13.5%. Based on a limited sample, then, First North is fulfilling its role as a lighter route to listing. The most expensive in euro terms was Nightingale, which paid EUR 8 million in fees on EUR 110 million of financing raised. The smallest First North listings, Alexandria, Solwers, Witted and LapWall, got by with costs of EUR 0.5–0.6 million in 2021–2022. In these, the capital raised was in the EUR 4–8 million range.
In summary, it’s hard to list on the Helsinki stock exchange for less than half a million euros. If you do list, you’re better off raising EUR 10 million right away rather than 5 million. Listing costs scale, because a EUR 5 million and a EUR 10 million offering require the same amount of documentation. Since June 2026, offerings below EUR 12 million no longer require a full prospectus, and companies can get onto First North with a lighter company description.
Elsewhere in Europe, prices are similar
A study by Oxera for the European Commission is probably one of the key sources for a European comparison. According to it, the total costs of listing are 5–15% of gross proceeds, and typically higher for small offerings.
The European Commission is concerned about the negative trend. According to market participants, the costs of both listing and being a listed company have risen significantly in recent decades and widened the gap between public and private financing. One reason behind this is Europe’s success at what we are known for around the world: adding regulation. On top of that, the shrinking of the European capital market, meaning the structural decline in the number of listed companies and the scarcity of listings, is accelerating the trend. When the ecosystem shrinks, there are fewer economies of scale and prices go up.
Finland and Sweden have everything it takes to show that the spiral can also be turned in a positive direction. In the previous listing cycle, which ended in 2022, we already saw that it is possible.
So what about the airport currency exchange? Part of the capital raised in Inderes’ listing was invested in the company’s internationalisation, so I pass through Helsinki Airport regularly. On a business trip, I walked up to the Forex counter, wallet wide open, and asked for a quote to exchange 100 euros into dollars. The offer was 101 dollars, which at that day’s rate corresponded to a commission of around 12%. Of the 37 companies in the sample, 12 paid a higher price than that, so objectively speaking, my comment was slightly exaggerated. I still consider it a fair counterpunch to the wallet story.
Inderes’ listing: EUR 286,903.50 and 5.0% of the capital raised
Since I had been ranting about excessive costs in 2020, we were under pressure to keep our own final bill reasonable when we listed in 2021. The final bill for Inderes’ listing was EUR 286,903.50, and we raised gross proceeds of EUR 5.7 million. Our original goal was to come in below Siili’s figure, but that turned out to be too ambitious.
There was no single big insight behind it, just several basic things:
- We chose challenger advisors who shared our view on the need for an efficient small-cap listing. Our goal was to build an efficient team around the project.
- We handled the sale of the offering entirely ourselves, using Inderes’ own distribution power. We had no institutional sales at all, which is where an investment bank typically takes its (well-earned) percentage fee.
- We questioned the need for every piece of documentation and every comfort letter, many times over. If something wasn’t strictly mandatory, we didn’t do it.
- We didn’t produce a traditional marketing brochure, and instead invested in our investor pages and the visual design of the prospectus itself.
- (AD) We built our investor pages on a platform developed by Inderes, which gets a site up at a fraction of the usual cost and time.
Our costs aren’t fully comparable, because we handled all the investor communications parts with our own resources. Doing a 100% public offering and relying on our own distribution power was also a risky choice, which paid off in the end. The market situation and the hype around our company in 2021 were so strong that we expected the offering to be a walkover. Of course, we had deliberately been building interest in the listing in public for a long time. Leaving institutions out worked brilliantly for the narrative, because normally it’s the retail investor who gets left out. Done the more conventional way, our price tag would probably also have climbed to around half a million euros.
More from the series
- Part 7 | Could the number of companies on the Helsinki stock exchange double?
- Part 6 | The gloom hanging over small-cap stocks
- Part 5 | Community-adjusted EBITDA and other tricks
- Part 4 | Monthly revenue reporting
- Part 3 | Share sales and the IPO
- Part 2 | Guidance and the profit warning
- Part 1 | The cost of being listed
