Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Danish FinTech Special
‘Consumers and retailers will be the judges of the future of mobile payments’ The war to win the market for mobile payments has just begun. FinTech expert Kim Vindberg-Larsen projects that it will be a long struggle between existing players, rebounding incumbents and new challengers, as they all want to dominate the most important contact point between consumer and retailer. Round two will focus on smart, convenient, fast, cost-effective and efficient solutions. By Louise Older Steffensen | Photos: Jakob Lerche
“Payments are boring,” Vindberg-Larsen asserts. For someone who has spent his life building new FinTech transaction solutions and advising businesses and think-tanks about the future of financial interactions, his statement is a tad surprising. He is right, though: no one goes shopping for the payment experience, and by far the best thing that can be said about transactions is that they are quick and efficient. This is exactly what Vindberg-Larsen has helped businesses achieve for the past 14 years – for the sake of the retailer and their customers. Apart from his current role as head of mobile at Dansk Supermarked Group, and his advisory role at the EU think60 | Issue 103 | August 2017
tank Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Vindberg-Larsen consults startups and small retailers across Europe to connect people across the extensive international network he has built up over the years. He is like a less brooding and much more talkative Morpheus, looking in on the Matrix with both excitement and disdain. He predicts that 2018 will bring big changes to the way payments are made.
The beginnings of mobile transactions Vindberg-Larsen began to plan for the future of payments as a FinTech entrepreneur in the early 2000s. “Back then, I
was attempting to do business on my first Mac laptop and trusty Motorola phone, and I became frustrated that I couldn’t even make simple payments through these increasingly important tools,” he says. “The idea of creating a little revenue from each transaction was appealing, and I dreamed of making payments easier. With my background in banking IT, I was well placed to create a system that would allow easy transactions independent of plastic cards or cash.” This materialised as the FinTech entrepreneur created MEE (Mobile Economic Ecosystem), also known as MEEwallet, at a time when plans to make payment mobile barely even existed. “Because the mobile platform was such unknown territory, we were free to think up completely new and ‘clean’ systems that were perfectly suited for easy payment and independent of preexisting financial structures like entering card details or using cards at all,”