Winning in America: Three Takeaways From FACC-NY's Strategic Forum 2026

The Finnish American Chamber of Commerce in New York held its annual Strategic Forum on September 10, 2026, at Scandinavia House. With around two hundred leaders in attendance, and with satellite events both before and after the Forum, marked a week of events unofficially coined as the Finland Week. FACC-NY traces its origins to 1948, founded over a lunch at the Waldorf Astoria by a small group of businessmen. Nearly eight decades later, the Strategic Forum 2026 stayed true to that founding premise: two nations learning to trust each other, one conversation at a time.

During the day of keynote speeches and panel discussions, three ideas ran through nearly every session, with key takeaways for founders and leaders building their businesses. The first was patience as a genuine competitive advantage. Winning in the US takes longer to show up in the numbers. Having a committed, long-term corporate owner sitting at the decision-making table matters. That patience extends to hiring and structure, too. Trust local management with real decision-making authority, and pay a US CEO more than the group CEO back home if that’s what it takes. And finally, stop treating the US as one market. A single national strategy rarely works across all of them.

The second relates to identity, raised in some form on nearly every panel: at what point does a company stop entering the US and simply become an American company? While there is no single playbook, consistent presence effectively makes a company American in practice, without requiring it to stop being Finnish at the same time. The harder, more specific question is which parts of being Finnish still help a company once it’s actually operating in the US. A session on Finland’s quantum computing sector raised a sharper version of that same question: how Finnish can a company afford to stay once its most important customers are American, and its technology is treated as strategically sensitive.

The third centered around the classical confidence gap: Finland builds world-class products and consistently undersells them, a habit that actively costs credibility in a market that rewards confident self-promotion. The advice was practical and blunt. Highlight successes more boldly, and draw on the decades of hard-won expertise Finnish companies have already accumulated expanding overseas. That knowledge, combined with the discipline that comes from serving an extremely demanding global customer, is what closes the gap fastest.

The day also marked a celebratory milestone, with Google’s announcement a day earlier, of its largest single investment in Europe. The $15 billion commitment to Finnish AI infrastructure stands as a testament to Finland’s expanding role in AI, a position that has increasingly earned it the nickname ‘the Texas of Europe.’ The US remains Finland’s largest export market today, with a business climate leaders throughout the day described as consistently attractive. The Strategic Forum 2026 was a strong example of what FACC-NY does well: bringing the ecosystem together, and helping founders and leaders connect with new ideas and opportunities.