The success of Vipps MobilePay

In Scandinavia, everybody pays everybody else with a QR code. I discovered that while I was on holiday there last month. They use a system called ‘Vipps’ for it. Sound familiar? Exactly… precisely the same as Usecue POS and Payconiq.

Below are two staggering statistics about Vipps MobilePay in Scandinavia:

• 11.5 million users in 2023
• 1.24 billion transactions in 2023

There is one small difference though: Vipps is far from free and you cannot simply get an account either. To create a Vipps account you first have to open an account with DNB (a Norwegian bank). For that you need a national identification number from Norway, Sweden or Denmark, so you have to be a resident of one of those countries. And that is rather inconvenient…

By way of illustration: in Norway we arrived at the car park of a beautiful hike and there you could only pay with Vipps. There was a sign from the municipality with a QR code on it (and a Vipps number for verification). The instruction read: pay 50 kroner via Vipps and state your licence plate in the description. Luckily I spotted an employee of the municipality. I explained that I came from the Netherlands and therefore could not create a Vipps account. I asked him how I, as a tourist, was supposed to pay for this car park. He laughed and said: “Tourists are free.” Sounds nice… but how do you recognise a tourist in a rental car? Fortunately I had a Dutch number plate. Another example are the many unstaffed fruit and honey stalls along the road, where you can only pay with Vipps. There too you miss out on a considerable share of your (potential) customers.

In many places you see PayPal links and bank account numbers as an alternative to Vipps. The latter makes a lot more sense and is in fact Usecue POS minus the convenience. On top of that, with Vipps you also pay 1% or more of your transactions to DNB. And yet Vipps is enormously popular in Scandinavia. And if Vipps can become a success there, then we can make Usecue POS a success in the Netherlands too… can’t we?

NB. Vipps says no to Google Pay as well! Yay!