I went to Trustech, a payments conference held in Cannes every year, in late November to participate in a panel. The topic was: how the Nordic banks have been so successful with mobile payments. In my capacity as head of sales, I represented Auka.
Our company are true mobile payments pioneers. Our CEO and founder Daniel Döderlein created the first mobile payments technology in Scandinavia and launched Norway’s first mobile payments solution direct to market, mCASH. You can read more about our story here.
The other panellists joining me were Geir Norlund from MeaWallet, Kim Fuglsang Kristoffersen from MobilePay and Narve Hansen from BankAxept.
Mobile payments in general and the success that Scandinavian banks have enjoyed with their own solutions are still somewhat of a mystery to many European bankers. When you talk to many bankers outside the Scandinavian region about mobile payments, the first thing they think of are NFC based solutions like Apple Pay. When we asked a group of 1,900 bankers from across 19 different European regions what they thought mobile payments were, 43% said contactless payments using a mobile device.
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No wonder then that many are sceptical of “mobile payments” as to date, using their definition, none of them have seen any monetary value coming from third-party or proprietary NFC based mobile payment schemes.
Our definition of mobile payments is very different and our solutions can be used by anyone in a particular region, in any payments scenario. There are many benefits (financial and otherwise) of using the solutions we describe as mobile payments – here we outline six of these.
I talk to bankers all over Europe and I’ve seen four distinct phases of payment “trends” take hold in the past two years. Speaking observationally, it’s only now that banks and bankers are starting to take The Scandinavian (and Chinese) model of mobile payments seriously.
Read more: The waves of payments change
During the panel session, Kim talked about the “MobilePay Success Story – Driving Innovation through a Customer-Centric Approach”. Mobilepay is probably the most successful mobile wallet globally in terms of usage (nine out of ten Danes with a smartphone use it).
At Auka, we’re very fond of MobilePay as they took the same approach to mobile payments that we are preaching. Coincidentally, MobilePay was launched by Danske Bank soon after our CEO initially introduced the Scandinavian banks to his vision for mobile payments 😉
Late last year, our CEO Daniel, also co-authored a two-part article for Enterprise Innovation about how and why Scandinavian banks have been so successful with launching and monetising mobile payments. In these pieces, they outline the ten commonalities shared between all the successful systems across the region (Sweden, Denmark and Norway).
The panellists were in agreement that the key to success lies in in creating solutions that give all consumers in a particular region the freedom and flexibility to pay anyone, anyhow, anytime. These solutions facilitate the use of great swathes of data (the same data is unavailable with traditional payment or NFC-based wallets) to create monetisation and up-sell opportunities for both bank providers and the merchants who use them.
This is the same formula which has also worked for the dominant mobile wallets in China and that Google and Facebook are now starting to use. At Auka, we can help any bank to replicate this blueprint and win the mobile payments race in their respective region.
