Accepting Vipps in Norway

Acceptance runs through Vipps MobilePay or a PSP connected to it, with the customer authorising in their own app. It is an account-based payment settling without card interchange, which is why its cost profile differs structurally from cards and why a blended rate erases the difference.

Merchants routinely file Norway and Switzerland in the same mental drawer marked outside the EU. For payments that drawer is wrong, and the difference is worth money.

Norway is a member of the European Economic Area, and EU payments law reaches the EEA EFTA States through the EEA Agreement. Regulation (EU) 2015/751, which caps consumer card interchange, was incorporated by EEA Joint Committee Decision 21/2019 of 8 February 2019 and entered into force for the EEA EFTA States on 1 January 2020. Directive (EU) 2015/2366, PSD2, was incorporated by EEA Joint Committee Decision 165/2019 of 14 June 2019 and entered into force on 1 May 2022.

So Norwegian consumer card volume is capped-interchange volume, and Norwegian acceptance sits under the same payment services framework as the rest of the internal market. Two things follow. The gap between Vipps and cards in Norway is structurally narrower than the equivalent gap in Switzerland, because the card side of the comparison is regulated. And a Norwegian card quote can be interrogated exactly the way a Dutch or German one can, with interchange, scheme fees and markup separated, rather than accepted as a single non-EU number. If your provider has been pricing Norway as a third country, that is a commercial position and not a legal one.

Dintero in Norway and Nexi through Netaxept, alongside Mollie and Computop, all document Vipps, among others, as do the other gateways serving the Nordics. The useful questions are what you pay per Vipps transaction against your effective Norwegian card rate, whether the line is reported separately, and whether recurring and one-off volume are priced the same way.

What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

How a wallet behaves inside your flow, from one-click through to the return after a challenge, is a checkout flow optimisation question as much as a pricing one.

Relevant markets: Norway