With a combined population of 27 million digitally-savvy consumers, the Nordic region is rapidly becoming a FinTech hotspot.
As the Yearbooks outline in detail, the frenetic buzz of activity around mobile payments, Open Banking, and of course the long-awaited P27 clearing project, means the Nordic region will continue to be a hive of hot FinTech action for the foreseeable future.
The merger of Norway’s Vipps, Denmark’s MobilePay and Finland’s Pivo, announced in June 2021, is on track to create a digital wallet serving 11 million users and over 330,000 merchants.
Crucially, it will be one of the largest bank-owned mobile payment providers in Europe, and expected to process around 700 million transactions annually.
Turning to Open Banking, it’s no surprise that the Nordic region is serving as a successful template for other markets to follow.
Launched in 2018, the Nordic API Gateway was one of the first ventures to explore Open Banking use cases in Europe, building third-party APIs, and enabling access to account and A2A data for more than 240 million Europeans through 2,000 banks.
The success of Nordic API Gateway (which in April 2021 rebranded as Aiia) led to it being acquired by Mastercard in September 2021, to serve as the payment scheme’s springboard into open banking.
The latest success story to come out of the Nordics is digital challenger bank Lunar Way, which launched in Denmark before expanding to Sweden in 2018, and racking up a series of acquisitions along the way, helped by over €400 million in investment as of early 2022.
Even Hollywood actor Will Ferrell threw money at Lunar, saying: “Nordic people are smart, sexy and are tired of having their money messed with. That’s where Lunar comes into play as a digital disrupter in the financial industry.”
In less exciting developments, the P27 payments project, which aims to establish the first integrated domestic and cross-border real-time payments platform in the Nordics and Scandinavian regions, continues its slow crawl towards an undetermined launch date.
The P27 system was estimated to go live with its first transactions in 2022, upon receipt of necessary regulatory approvals and central bank connections.
But it’s been a slow slog, and the lack of direct connections to banks appears to be what’s hampering P27’s progress.
In April 2022, P27 stated that it was getting closer to a full operational launch, having spent the last year ramping up infrastructure platforms with vendors, while cajoling banks into laying the necessary payment rails and technical integrations to ensure bank customers can get onboard.
Other than a tentative estimate that the first live service would be launched by the end of 2022, that’s about as much detail the initiative was prepared to give.
The Digital & Card Payment Yearbooks have been redesigned to encompass the widening payment and fintech ecosystems. Covering 43 countries across Europe and Eurasia, the 2022 editions include even more valuable data and insights (including growth forecasts) generated from the impact of Covid-19 on all payment metrics.
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The report comprises of 2 volumes – Volume 1 covers payments statistics of the 33 European countries and Volume 2 contains the Eurasian payments statistics on 10 countries. The European Digital & Card Payment Yearbooks 2021-22 and the Eurasian Digital & Card Payment Yearbooks2021–22 are available to purchase as complete volumes or as individual country profiles.
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