Norway Has a Big New Mobile Payments Choice, and it’s Not Apple Pay

Recent word out of the Norwegian mobile payments market generated something of a surprise recently when word of the most downloaded app in the country came out.

The new number one app is a mobile payments app, and it’s not Apple Pay. Nor is it Samsung Pay.

Rather, it’s an app known as Vipps, and it’s the first peer-to-peer mobile payment solution from DNB.

The Vipps app got its start six months ago, and despite that comparatively short run time, it’s currently in use by roughly one out of four Norwegians in the entire country.

Developed in conjunction with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the app works on all current mobile devices and allows users to not only trade payments back and forth, it also allows for short chat messaging.

While any DNB customer can put it to work, it’s also available outside DNB customers.

TCS vice president for banking and financial services Susheel Vasudevan noted that the global banking industry was facing some major changes in what customers wanted, and so needed to respond accordingly with new tools and adaptations to customer behavior.

DNB’s head of IT and operations, Liv Fiksdahl, had high praise for TCS’ involvement in the operation.

What this demonstrates perhaps more than anything is that there’s a clear demand for peer-to-peer mobile payments. Admittedly, a lot of people think retail first when it comes to mobile payments, and with good reason.

When we go shopping, we don’t pay other people; we pay a store. So naturally, the first inclination is to bulk up the consumer-to-business side of things.

What’s often not considered, however, is how often we pay each other. Whether we’re settling a bar bet, the outcome of a ball game, or just paying off our share of the lunch tab, we do a lot of business with close friends and associates. A mobile payments system to accommodate that would likely go over as well as any retailer’s special, and right now, peer-to-peer has been thin on the ground development-wise.

Vipps has made a substantial name for itself in a short time filling in a gap that, so far, had gone mostly unfilled so far. The value of seeing what the market wants and providing it is universal, and we should be looking for more mobile payment systems to take peer-to-peer seriously.