Her enrollment at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (2014-2017) offered a mix of quantitative courses and policy debate, while committee work and an investment club sharpened presentation skills. Through a short internship at the Central Bank of Latvia in 2016, she gained experience that later proved useful in assessing the efficiency of rail payments.
Academic add-ons
In search of better data skills, Kuhtarska enrolled in Harvard Business School’s online course “Data Science for Business.” The course teaches how to convert raw payment numbers into clear measures, a lesson that appears again and again in this Lasma Kuhtarska biography. The program shows students how to ask the right question, choose a simple model, test whether it works, and explain the results in simple terms so any team can use them. By focusing on clean data and clear goals, the course promotes the habit of making decisions based on facts rather than guesswork.
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. The company operates private and corporate banking in Sweden, the Baltics and other Northern European markets. There she compared processing speeds, fee structures and risk models across card networks and account-to-account methods. Colleagues recall her methodical approach: mapping the costs and latency of each stakeholder before proposing incremental solutions. The early work also met the requirement for Latvian economist Lasma Kuhtarska to understand both local regulations and pan-European policies such as PSD2.
Founding of Noda
In 2018, Lasma Kuhtarska worked with software developers and payment specialists as co-founder and later chief strategy officer of Noda.
By 2025, Noda reported connections to over 2,000 banks in 28 jurisdictions. The network size, while impressive, is just as remarkable as the platform’s design logic: a single point of integration instead of country-specific workarounds. This structural choice reflects Kuhtarska’s econometric roots, namely simplifying variables to improve predictability. Lasma Kuhtarskas Noda fulfills a fundamental merchant need while simplifying the somewhat dizzying complexity of the backend. Onboarding may not be as quick as plug-and-play, but it tends to move in that direction thanks to a straightforward UX.
Industry context
Open banking has evolved from concept to infrastructure across Europe. Nevertheless, acceptance remains inconsistent; Merchants outside the EU core still rely heavily on cards. Kuhtarska’s public lectures highlight this gap and argue for gradual migration paths: parallel acceptance of cards and A2A payments, unified voting dashboards and transparent fee comparisons. Such suggestions are consistent with the cautious tone of this Lasma Kuhtarska biography, emphasizing measured progress rather than headline-seeking.
Regulators are working on new rules called PSD3 in the European Union and a new set of rules in the United Kingdom. Coming laws will likely require payment companies to make their APIs faster, have clear backup plans in case something breaks, and follow clearer steps for repeat payments. Companies that start checking the speed of their system and setting up good consent tools now will spend less money on repairs later.
Tech trends are also changing payment transactions. More and more companies are using machine learning to detect fraud and show each buyer the payment button they are most likely to use. Quick checks of live transaction data can reduce false positives. Simple, smart checkout pages can speed up the process for customers. As instant payment networks grow across Europe, stores touting faster money processing and lower fees could win over people who still use cards purely out of habit.
For observers of the UK and European payments landscape, Latvian Lasma Kuhtarska’s career as a strategist offers a case study in how analytical training, regulatory awareness and incremental product design can come together to shape an international fintech platform without relying on overt advertising narratives.
