Nordea Bank ditches Swipp for MobilePay partnership

Swipp
CASHED OUT: Business customers will receive an offer to switch from Swipp to MobilePay

Nordea Bank Denmark is ending its support for Swipp, the mobile payment joint venture it formed alongside other Danish banks in 2014, by deciding to “join a partnership” to develop Danske Bank’s MobilePay platform.

With the new partnership, Nordea will leave the Swipp collaboration and will instead invest in the further development of MobilePay, which has more than 3.2m registered users and more than 35,000 business customers in Denmark and Norway.

“At first, Nordea’s personal customers will not experience any changes, whereas business customers who do not already have a MobilePay agreement will soon receive an offer to switch from their existing Swipp agreement to MobilePay,” Nordea says.

“For the time being, Swipp agreements for business customers will remain in effect.

“The aim is to make sure that private users and businesses in Norway and Denmark have a widely used, user-friendly mobile payment platform that is subject to constant innovation. Danske Bank is also inviting all interested Danish, Norwegian and Finnish banks to participate in the MobilePay partnership.”

Other banks in Denmark, Norway and Finland are also expected to join the partnership. As a result, Danske Bank will begin converting MobilePay to a subsidiary, and MobilePay will no longer be branded as “by Danske Bank”.

MobilePay is also seeking to enter into a partnership with Sweden’s Swish mobile payments platform to let Nordic users make payments between the two services.

Accelerate innovation

“MobilePay allows us to offer Nordic users and businesses one of the world’s most comprehensive mobile payment systems,” says Tonny Thierry Andersen, Danske Bank executive board member.  “By joining forces with other banks, MobilePay will be able to accelerate innovation, which means that we can offer the absolute best user experience.”

“The new partnership will benefit our customers, the market and the individual banks,” adds Peter Lybecker, Nordea Bank Denmark CEO. “MobilePay is known today for its user friendliness, and we want to contribute to making the solution even more widely used and to continue the development of MobilePay as an innovative digital payment platform. All users will benefit.”

Swipp was formed by Nordea Bank Denmark, Nykredit Bank, Sydbank, Jyske Bank, Arbejdernes Landsbank, Spar Nord Bank and members of local banks in 2014, and went on to acquire Paii — the mobile payments joint venture created by Danish mobile network operators — in November 2014 to create a single service for in-store and online payments as well as money transfers.

MobilePay enables peer-to-peer money transfers and mobile purchases in-store and online. It is the market leader in the Nordic countries and is expected to reach more than 180m transactions and a volume of DKK 40bn (US$5.91bn) in 2016, according to Nordea, with almost 25% of the transactions made in shops and businesses.

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