Norway's Vipps Seeks EU Antitrust Help Against Apple

Norwegian FinTech Vipps is seeking the European Union’s help in an antitrust battle against Apple.

CEO Rune Garborg told Reuters in an interview published Wednesday (Feb. 15) that the payments company wants regulators to force Apple to allow unrestricted access to its tap-and-go technology so other firms can be more competitive.

Reuters notes that his comments followed a hearing — in which Vipps was a third party — where Apple attempted to convince EU antitrust officials that it doesn’t prevent rivals from accessing its mobile wallet technology. It was the company’s last chance to defend its position or face heavy fines, the news outlet noted.

Vipps argues the issue is crucial because of Apple’s popularity among Scandinavian consumers and because of the growing use of mobile payments powered by near field communication (NFC) technology.

“This is really important for us,” Garborg told Reuters. “Seventy-eight percent of card transactions in Norway are done through terminals. It is why NFC is so important, especially among young people.”

He added that Apple was “only sharing NFC with banks, which have to pay for installing their cards in Apple Pay. But for us as a wallet, we don’t have open access to NFC.”

According to Reuters, Vipps said NFC access would broaden the geographical reach of its mobile wallet, allowing for more innovations and simplifying cross-border transactions.

PYMNTS spoke with Garborg last year about the difficulty of competing in an ecosystem dominated by Big Tech companies.

“We need to build strong brands,” he said. “If you look at the eCommerce space now and who is going to dominate the eCommerce space, it’s not going to be single banks, it’s going to be the big international brands.”

Vipps managed to strengthen its brand last year when it merged with two other leading Nordic mobile wallets — MobilePay in Denmark and Pivo in Finland. The move created one of the largest bank-owned digital wallets in the region, serving more than 11 million users and over 330,000 merchants across the three countries.

Garborg’s comments to Reuters came on the same day as reports that the U.S. Justice Department was scaling up its antitrust investigation into Apple, part of a large pattern of action involving the tech giant and its relationship with third party companies.

In the midst of that battle last year, Apple reportedly offered to allow other app stores to access its devices in Europe, in response to new EU rules set to go into effect next year.

As PYMNTS noted at the time, Apple was working on opening up its application programming interfaces (APIs), camera technologies and NFC chip to third-party apps, the last of which would allow other companies’ mobile wallets onto the devices.