Ahead of the NextGen Nordics conference on April 27, 2022, we will provide a weekly briefing that highlights key stories emerging from the region, showcasing the advancements in payment innovation across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.
NextGen Nordics aims to gather diverse stakeholders—including the banking community, central banks, public authorities, and businesses—to foster community discussions and explore ways to leverage new technologies in the Nordic region. Register for the event here.
Danske Bank Announces Trade AI App
Danske Bank has announced plans to enhance its trade finance process through a partnership with Conpend to utilize the Trade AI app. This application seeks to streamline current procedures, improve efficiency and transparency, lower error rates, and provide a readily accessible end-to-end audit trail for trade finance transactions.
Designed to facilitate automation and digitization within the trade finance value chain, the app accommodates both paper-based and digital documents, which can be scanned and analyzed. The application reads and verifies document contents against a set of predefined criteria.
With artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, the app automatically checks compliance with anti-money laundering, know your customer, and sanctions regulations, thereby improving the review process for trade finance experts and compliance officers.
“By converting physical documents into digital data, we can leverage that data for trade and compliance processes,” stated Erik Punt, product owner of Danske Bank’s trade finance portfolio. He added, “We anticipate significant efficiency gains after investing time in training the system to capture and qualify data. This will enable us to analyze various complex customer documents more effectively.”
SurePay Expands Confirmation of Payee Solution to the Nordics
SurePay, a company specializing in Confirmation of Payee solutions, has expanded its operations into the Nordics with the recruitment of Steen Álvarez Jacobsen as the new business development manager. He will oversee SurePay’s activities in the region, drawing from his previous experiences at AltaPay and Valitor.
This development follows SurePay’s successful €12.2 million funding round in September 2021, aimed at supporting international growth and assembling business development teams and IT experts to scale its platform and develop new customer solutions.
Steen Álvarez Jacobsen remarked, “Last year, more than six million euros were lost due to invoice and CEO fraud in Denmark alone, highlighting the urgent need for Confirmation of Payee.”
Avarda Partners with Aiia on Open Banking Services
Swedish payment service provider Avarda has partnered with Danish open banking service Aiia, a Mastercard subsidiary, to enable open banking payments through its white-label solutions. This collaboration will also facilitate Avarda’s buy now pay later offering.
Mikael Johansson, CEO of Avarda, commented, “The payment industry is evolving rapidly, and we aim to keep pace by offering the most convenient payment solutions for merchants and retailers. We are excited to launch this initiative with Aiia and Mastercard, as they possess robust connectivity with banks in the Nordics.”
Fellow Finance Shifts Focus to Banking Operations
Fellow Finance in Finland is transitioning away from its P2P lending business to focus exclusively on establishing a banking operation, following a similar move by Zopa. The loan-based crowdfunding and platform is merging with Evli Bank to form Fellow Bank.
Set to commence operations in April, Fellow Bank will provide customers with options to sell their loan portfolios and open interest-bearing bank accounts and fixed term deposit accounts.
Fellow Finance has facilitated consumer and business financing exceeding 900 million euros across Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, serving over 1,000,000 customers.
The company assures that it will continue to support active loan investments without requiring customer action due to the cessation of intermediation. This strategic shift mirrors Zopa’s recent decision to wind down its lending business to focus fully on banking, citing a decline in customer trust in P2P investing and regulatory changes that increased operational costs.