Nordics merge digital wallets MobilePay, Vipps, Pivo across the region

Danske Bank has agreed to merge three digital wallets MobilePay, Vipps and Pivo with respective owners OP Financial Group in Finland and the consortium of banks behind Vipps in Norway.

The ambition is to create Europe’s best and most comprehensive digital wallet. Serving 11 million users and over 330,000 shops and web shops, the company will be one of the largest bank-owned mobile payment providers in Europe.

The parties wish to join forces to further strengthen product development and innovation and thereby provide a market-leading customer experience within payment solutions – while at the same time giving personal as well as business customers access to the best features of each of their existing solutions.

In addition, the parties plan to invest heavily in e-commerce, which has been growing rapidly in recent years, and to ensure users access to mobile cross-border payments.

“MobilePay has been a fantastic success. However, it is very expensive to compete with global competitors in this space and in order to continue to develop the most attractive solutions for our customers, MobilePay must be part of something bigger to gain scale and pool investments for further innovation,” says Glenn Söderholm, Head of Personal & Business Customers in Danske Bank.

“No partnership would be better than teaming up with Norwegian Vipps – it is the perfect match for MobilePay. At the same time, it is a great strength that Pivo, will also be part of the merger. We are proud to take part in creating a new and future-oriented FinTech business in the Nordic region, and Danske Bank will continue to be a dedicated co-owner of the new business.”

The merger is expected to result in a one-off gain for Danske Bank of approximately DKK 400-500 million. The merger is conditional on approval by the relevant authorities, including the European Commission. Final approval is expected in H2 2021 or in early 2022, hence the one-off gain is not included in our current outlook for the full year.

The banks behind Vipps will own 65{3c4481f38fc19dde56b7b1f4329b509c88239ba5565146922180ec5012de023f} of the new parent company, Vipps AS, Danske Bank will own 25{3c4481f38fc19dde56b7b1f4329b509c88239ba5565146922180ec5012de023f} and the OP Financial Group will own 10{3c4481f38fc19dde56b7b1f4329b509c88239ba5565146922180ec5012de023f}. The reason for the Norwegian share is that the banks behind Vipps cover almost the entire Norwegian banking sector.

The MobilePay brand and a shared platform

The MobilePay brand will continue in its current markets. Most personal users and businesses will therefore not experience any changes to their use of MobilePay, but will see new and innovative solutions becoming available at an even faster pace.

The merged business will build the common technology platform starting from Vipps’ platform, which is independent from the owner banks, and runs fully in public cloud. With a shared technical platform and strengthened development capabilities, it will be considerably easier and faster to bring new products and solutions to the market for the benefit of both personal and business customers.