European Commission cuts wings of integration Vipps | DN

In June 2021, Norwegian company Vipps, Danish Mobilepay and Finnish Pivo announced that three mobile wallets would be combined.

However, the former two announced on Friday that Pivo, which is owned by OP Bank of Finland, will not be allowed to participate. It happens after the European Commission “raised” unification concerns.

Concerned about the market focus

The Committee believes that the merger would have created a market situation in the portfolio market in Finland that was too high. This is because Pivo and Mobilepay split the market between them in Finland.

– In Norway, Vipps is the largest player and Mobilepay is the same as in Denmark, but in Finland there are two main players. The European Union was concerned that the merger would lead to too high market concentration, says Vipps Director of Communications, Caroline Lund.

A new formal application has now been submitted to the European Commission, and the companies are hoping to get approval before Christmas. Then work begins to build an organization across Norway, Finland and Denmark. This is what Phipps wrote in a press release.

We are now getting in somewhat fewer customers in Finland and only one brand instead of three, but the commission was so clear that it was necessary to make changes in Finland so that we could go through the approval process, says Lundy.

It will prove its presence in many countries

In all, the combined company will have approximately 11 million users, 400,000 stores, and 900 million annual transactions.

“We will continue to grow in Norway and Denmark, plus we will invest in growth and development in Finland and aim to be the leading mobile payments solution in Finland,” Vipps CEO Rune Garborg says in the press release.

The long-term goal, Lund adds, is to establish a presence in other European countries, and to be able to create a common European mobile wallet.

variable contribution

When the merger was first announced, the banks behind Vipps were scheduled to take 65 percent of the shares, while Danske Bank and OP Bank were to take 25 and 10 percent stakes, respectively.

With OB Bank now out of the merger, the banks behind Vipps will take a 72.2 per cent stake, while Danske Bank will take a 27.8 per cent stake.

This is despite the fact that Mobilepay was launched two years before Vipps, it has the largest number of users in 2021 He had nearly double the daily transaction amount as Vipps.(Conditions)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases using links that lead directly to our pages. All or part of the Content may not be copied or otherwise used with written permission or as permitted by law. For additional terms look here.