The most powerful woman in the Norwegian business industry, Berit Svendsen, talks about strategic partnerships. As the Head of International Expansion at payment service Vipps she is now leading the work towards a European wallet alliance. Join Copenhagen Member Meeting to hear more about her thoughts!
1. How do you see the bank collaboration behind the newly merged Vipps?
With all the Norwegian banks gathered behind Vipps as owners, the newly merged Vipps has a unique standing in Norway. The bank collaboration through common ownership provides great distribution power, with banks promoting Vipps services directly to their own customers. Through the banks own interest in promoting and creating a strong Vipps, customer driven innovation and collaboration on user experience optimisation is far more accessible, giving Vipps full speed ahead on their mission to excite people every day through world-class simplification.
2. As you recently made a deal with AliPay in Norway, what are your expectations for this service?
The partnership with Alipay has several strategic advantages. First, we are now able to offer our customers a much easier way to accept payments from Chinese tourists, and soon make this into a profitable business for Vipps as acquirer. Chinese tourism is increasing rapidly every year, and for merchants its becoming more and more important to be China-friendly and to benefit from the strong purchasing power among Chinese. Secondly, the partnership gives us a much easier path towards interoperability on InStore mobile payments throughout Europe. Together with E-Passi, we are now working together towards a European wallet alliance, which means Vipps users soon can pay with their wallet abroad using QR-codes, based on the Alipay QR-code format.
3. Is Vipps planning to expand internationally as a B2B service and what do you see as the most interesting market for you?
Through our partnership with Gemalto, Vipps has already expanded internationally as a B2B service. In October 2018, Vipps entered into a strategic agreement with Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, to provide a secure digital turnkey solution for QR and NFC proximity payment as well as e-commerce. The new solution aims to provide secure payment services to retailers, private label issuers and domestic schemes across the world. Customers will benefit from an end-to-end secure cloud service compliant with every digital wallet available in the market.
In addition to this we see great opportunities on international expansion both on mobile wallets and electronic ID solutions. In particularly on electronic ID, we see high attention in Europe right now. In Norway we probably managed to create the most successful payment and ID-services in the world, looking at the market penetration and usage. The recipe for the success has been the collaboration model between banks on common services, ownership, common infrastructure and marketing. Together with a great user experience, solutions that works across sectors and different players and best in class marketing performance, we have managed to create a nationwide market penetration on the wallet and our ID-solutions. Our services and position has created great attention worldwide and make us very well positioned for international expansion.
