Norwegian banks are coming together to merge their payments.
According to Reuters, the purpose behind this merger is to combat competition from global payment companies, perhaps ones like PayPal or Square Cash to name a few.
DNB, banking group Eika, Sparebank 1 Gruppen and others will merge their respective payment systems Vipps (mobile payment app), BankAxept (debit card service) and BankID (online authentication service) payment systems to form a unified system.
The goal is to have the combined system running by August 2018.
DNB CEO Rune Bjerke told Reuters:
We have two choices. Either let the existing payments infrastructure wither away, or join forces and push forward.
Read more on Telecompaper, Finextra and Reuters.