The Tectonic Shift in Norwegian Mobile Payments

November 27, 2017         By: Steven Anderson

If the title sounds like click-bait to you, I assure you, it’s not near as close to hyperbole as you might think. The Norwegian mobile payment market really is undergoing a shift that’s perhaps best described as “tectonic” in nature because it represents such a large-scale change. Several banking groups—including DNB, Eika and Sparebank 1 Gruppen—have gotten together and decided to take several separate mobile payment systems and combine them into one larger system.

This affects BankID, BankAxept, and Vipps systems, and by August 2018, the end result will be a massive new system that covers a lot more ground than any one did separately. The best part about this is is that the three systems themselves cover a different part of mobile payments operation; Vipps itself is the mobile payment app, but Bank Axept is a debit card service. BankID, meanwhile, is an authentication platform for online operations.

It’s all still early-stage stuff; the groups involved are still trying to figure out who owns how much of the end product. However, even at this early stage the end result is already being seen as vital to the health of all going forward. After all, with some incoming regulations about to take hold that allows new tech firms—everything from local boys to big global names like Apple and Facebook—to compete in the mobile payments market, the current stakeholders need a more robust solution to hold their market share and keep bringing in new users.

The new product, once it’s completed, should prove a real game-changer in the market. After all, we’re talking about a system that’s not only mobile payments-ready, but can also work with debit cards—itself a popular form of mobile payment—and has a security package built right in. That’s hard to pass up; safe mobile payments in several forms will likely get users. When something ticks all the boxes like that, it’s hard to pass up.

The only real question left to ask, meanwhile, is if this system can be launched before Apple Pay and all the rest swoop in and land the market share. If it can, then it’s got a very real chance of competing with the first-mover advantage. If it loses first-mover advantage, though, it may have a real problem on its hands.