MobilePay: Could fees be introduced for using Danish payment app?
The CEO of Danish payment app MobilePay said on Thursday that charging users for transferring money using the app is ‘an option’.
While it is currently free to send money to a friend or contact using MobilePay, a charge could be introduced in the future after the company’s CEO Claus Bunkenborg said he was open to the idea.
“It makes sense to think that something that you don’t charge for today, you could maybe charge for tomorrow. So of course it is an option, but it’s not something that’s coming tomorrow,” Bunkenborg told financial news outlet Børsen.
MobilePay was originally launched in Denmark by Danske Bank in 2013. In its early days, the service cost around 1 kroner per transfer according to Børsen.
Later, other Danish banks joined the app as non-stakeholding partners, which allowed the cost of a transfer to drop to a few øre or fractions of a krone.
MobilePay registered a loss of 342 million kroner in 2022 according to the report. Bunkenborg said the result was due to high costs on the Finnish market, where the app is also available. Costs related to prevention of money laundering have also increased, he said.
Danske Bank announced in early 2021 that its MobilePay service would be merged with similar services in Norway and Finland. This eventually became a merger with Norwegian service Vipps. The company is now called Vipps MobilePay and is primarily owned by the banks which hold Vipps. Danske Bank earned 415 million kroner from the sale of MobilePay and now owns a 27.8 percent stake in the company.
Over half a billion transactions were made on MobilePay in 2022, its highest total so far and a 19 percent increase on the previous year, according to the company.
Transactions will eventually be possible between MobilePay in Denmark and Finland and the Norwegian equivalent Vipps, the company has said. That would make MobilePay the first app to allow mobile transfers between currencies.
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While it is currently free to send money to a friend or contact using MobilePay, a charge could be introduced in the future after the company’s CEO Claus Bunkenborg said he was open to the idea.
“It makes sense to think that something that you don’t charge for today, you could maybe charge for tomorrow. So of course it is an option, but it’s not something that’s coming tomorrow,” Bunkenborg told financial news outlet Børsen.
MobilePay was originally launched in Denmark by Danske Bank in 2013. In its early days, the service cost around 1 kroner per transfer according to Børsen.
Later, other Danish banks joined the app as non-stakeholding partners, which allowed the cost of a transfer to drop to a few øre or fractions of a krone.
MobilePay registered a loss of 342 million kroner in 2022 according to the report. Bunkenborg said the result was due to high costs on the Finnish market, where the app is also available. Costs related to prevention of money laundering have also increased, he said.
Danske Bank announced in early 2021 that its MobilePay service would be merged with similar services in Norway and Finland. This eventually became a merger with Norwegian service Vipps. The company is now called Vipps MobilePay and is primarily owned by the banks which hold Vipps. Danske Bank earned 415 million kroner from the sale of MobilePay and now owns a 27.8 percent stake in the company.
Over half a billion transactions were made on MobilePay in 2022, its highest total so far and a 19 percent increase on the previous year, according to the company.
Transactions will eventually be possible between MobilePay in Denmark and Finland and the Norwegian equivalent Vipps, the company has said. That would make MobilePay the first app to allow mobile transfers between currencies.
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