INFRASTRUCTURE: THE NORDICS
Above and beyond
Peter Larsson of Volante Technologies and Kasper Mortensen from Nordea describe how the forward-thinking Nordics are starting to look beyond P27 – towards the next innovations and the rest of the world The mercurial Nordic region has long been recognised for financial services innovation. In 2017, six top regional banks and other financial sector players got together to from what would become a new Nordic payments platform called Project 27 (P27) – the world’s first real-time, cross-border payment system in multiple currencies. It set out to connect the close-knit countries of Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway to give the region’s 27 million inhabitants and its businesses a more seamless payments experience – but the spin-offs will go much further than that. With the first stage of implementation now imminent in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the Nordic Payments Council (NPC) is looking beyond P27 going live, to how its members can ‘innovate on top’. The bar has been raised for creating an even better user experience, more commercial opportunities for local banks and, ultimately, interconnectivity with Europe and the rest of the globe. We asked Peter Larsson, business development director of Swedish
payments-as-a-service provider Volante Technologies and member of the NPC and European Payments Council (EPC), and Kasper Mortensen from Nordic bank Nordea and a founding member of the P27 advisory board, what happens next. THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: You’re now very close to sending card payments over the P27 network, but what are the opportunities for future innovation? PETER LARSSON: Bill payments represent a real game changer for the industry. In Sweden, we’re also aiming to move batch services from existing banks into P27, for invoicing, pensions, salaries, consumer account-to-account transfers, and for merchants and corporates too. Confirmation-of-payee will secure payments by ensuring, before we make them, that the beneficiary represents an actual person or company, to reduce fraud. In the Nordics, we do a lot of business between our countries. We live in Malmö, in Sweden, and work in Copenhagen, for instance, and Norwegians, Swedes and Danes invest in properties in each others’
countries. Where we are commuting and sharing investments, we need to do those transfers cheaply and simply. We don’t need to open extra bank accounts in the country we choose to live in; it should be very simple to pay for everything. KASPER MORTENSEN: Even before P27 goes live, there are many innovations going on in the market. There are bill payments, on the back of Request to Pay (RTP), and many other big opportunities for us, as a Nordic bank, to improve our product offering and commercialise on top of the infrastructure. For many years, we have not really developed many advanced payment products, and, if we take MobilePay and Swish out of the equation, there is a lot that can be done differently.
Just the start: Corporates and international banks could all benefit from what P27 represents
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Issue 12 | ThePaytechMagazine
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