Nordic API Gateway first Danish fintech to land PISP licence
Nordic API Gateway, the fintech behind the money app Spiir, is one of the first Danish companies to land its payment initiation service provider (PISP) licence.
Nordic Gateway API founder Rune Mai
After two years of hard work, founder and CEO, Rune Mai, tells FinTech Futures that his company has gained “a huge advantage in the market”.
In the coming months this new licence will enable the company to offer account-to-account payments to online retail clients – all the clients will need to do is drop in one line of code.
“Mastercard’s acquisition of Net’s real-time payments business was a huge validation for us,” says Mai. “It shows that big players will need our technology. Visa must be looking for these technologies as we speak.”
For Mai and his company, it’s all about convenience for the customer. Taking out the middleman means less cost to the retailer and less payment process time – “if we can cut that cost in half it means something”.
By 2020, 20% of e-commerce is predicted to be account-to-account, rather than direct debit. This prompts Mai to observe that “we’ll see a lot of competition in this space”.
Account-to-account avoids buyers sharing information, bringing Mai back to Nordic API Gateway’s main concern: convenience of the customer.
“That’s the real drive for us,” says Mai. “When we began with Spiir we had no competition because no one had thought of this as the consumer.”
Nordic API Gateway is already supporting major banks such as Danske Bank, Jyske Bank and DNB with its infrastructure. Soon the company will be announcing new clients who Mai says will need “hundreds of millions of transactions” processed with its code.
