By Dominic Chopping
Danske Bank AS said Wednesday that it has agreed to merge its mobile-payment platform MobilePay with OP Financial Group's Pivo platform in Finland and with the Vipps platform in Norway.
Danske Bank said the move will further strengthen product development and innovation, with the parties planning to invest heavily in e-commerce to give users access to mobile cross-border payments.
"It is very expensive to compete with global competitors in this space and in order to continue to develop the most attractive solutions for our customers, MobilePay must be part of something bigger to gain scale and pool investments for further innovation," Glenn Soderholm, head of personal and business customers at Danske Bank, said.
The merger is subject to regulatory approval which is expected in the second half of 2021 or in early 2022, and is expected to result in a one-off gain for Danske Bank of 400 million-500 million Danish kroner ($64 million-$80 million), it said.
The banks behind Vipps, including DNB ASA, the SpareBank 1 alliance, the Eika alliance and Sparebanken More among others, will own 65% of the new parent company, Vipps AS, with Danske Bank owning 25% and the OP Financial Group owning 10%.
Vipps AS will be headquartered in Oslo and there will be no layoffs as a result of the merger, Danske added.
Write to Dominic Chopping at dominic.chopping@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
06-30-21 0418ET
