Nordea and OP say that they are preparing for the payment revolution by building a new platform that facilitates payments between consumers and the management of e-invoices. It challenges Mobilepay, which is already found in every other Finn.
Will Mobilepay be a challenger from Nordea and OP’s future payment platform? Simo Sahla / Tiina Somerpuro
In their joint press release, Nordea and OP state that they are establishing a joint venture whose goal is to solve payment challenges domestically. The arrangement is still awaiting the approval of the competition authority.
The companies are working on a new platform that allows consumers and companies to make payments with a phone number, similar to Mobilepay. In addition to facilitating payments between consumers, the purpose is to streamline the sending, receiving and administration of e-invoices.
– In the future, the merchant could send e-invoices to his customers using just a phone number. This project is a natural course of development for the financial industry, of which we have also seen examples in other Nordic countries, Nordea’s head of personal customer business Jani Eloranta says in the announcement.
The companies say that the solution will be built in an open manner, in which case it can be used by others.
– We hope that as many market players as possible will join the network in the future to develop the operating model and services, OP’s director responsible for everyday economic services Masa Peura says in the announcement.
What’s going on with the Transfer service?
Nordea and OP have collaborated on mobile payments before. They jointly own Siirto Brand Oy, whose operations will expand with the new joint venture.
It is said that the operations of the banking giants’ joint Mierto service will continue as before until the new company starts operations in 2024. Consumer applications included in the service are Nordea Siirto, OP-mobiili and Pivo. The platform can be used with Nordea, OP, S-bank and Ålandsbanken accounts.
The Siirto application has been used by 1.4 million Finns, while Pivo can be found by 1.2 million. On the other hand, there are 2.5 million Mobilepay users.
OP left a joint European project
In September 2022, OP Financial Group and Pivo announced that they would withdraw from the joint European mobile wallet project.
According to the EU Commission’s view, the merger of OP’s Pivo application and Mobilepay, owned at the time by Danske Bank, could have led to excessive concentration of the Finnish mobile payment market.
In June 2021, Pivo, Mobilepay and Norwegian Vipps announced their plan to form a joint mobile payment platform. Mobilepay and Vipps merged at the end of 2022.
Sources: Nordea and OP, Mobilepay