The Danish mobile payment service Mobilepay, established by Danske Bank, is pulling out of Norway after major bank Nordea opted to give it up in favour of DNB’s Vipps service. Newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) reported that only 3,000 of Nordea’s roughly 1 million customers had downloaded Mobilepay.
The Danish service can claim around 3.8 million users, with around 40,000 merchants offering it to customers. A professor at business school NHH, Tor Andreassen, told DN that Mobilepay entered the market too late to compete against Vipps.
Nordea announced on Wednesday that it had entered into a cooperation agreement with Vipps for distribution to its customers. A Nordea official said the bank decided that “one strong and clear supplier will offer the best and simplest payment solution for Norwegian consumers.”
On Thursday morning, however, state broadcaster NRK reported that Vipps was having technical problems and was unavailable in several areas. Vipps claims to have 2.6 million users, and daily transactions of around 350,000.
newsinenglish.no staff
