iZettle gets plugged in with Nordea


    After covering their massive €40 million round the other week, iZettle is back in the news again, this time securing a partnership with Nordea, the largest retail banks in the Nordic countries with 800 locations. The deal makes iZettle the preferred mobile partner for Nordea, which will lead the bank’s customers and small business owners to iZettle’s mobile chip and pin payment solution.

    “In a sense we’re still a young company with a reasonably unknown brand,” says Jacob de Geer, CEO of iZettle. “It’s great that they’ve chose us as a preferred partner as an indication that we’re doing something good.”

    iZettle’s solution is targeting the micro-business and small business segments that need flexibility, or want to take credit card payments but don’t necessarily require the serious cash-register linked POS solutions you might see at the grocery store. iZettle’s bluetooth chip and pin reader pairs with your smartphone or tablet, allowing you take credit card payments on your device. It’s trendy, it’s cool, but it’s still not something I’ve spotted much in the wild when going across the Nordic countries.

    This deal should work good for iZettle as a name to drop, helping them hit Nordic clients that are suspicious of brand-new payment providers, preferring to stick with whatever payment brands they already know or trust.

    “From Nordea’s perspective this is a segment they really haven’t gone after. The alternative is to do it themselves but what I think what we’re seeing in the banking sector is that innovation isn’t their core competence, but leveraging their customer base is.”

    Asking de Geer more about the capital they raised, he says they’ll be partially focusing down on customer acquisition – which could mean going after more European or South American locations or penetrating their current markets further. Currently iZettle is available in the U.K., Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally de Geer mentioned this is a possibility to build complementing technology, like a vertical loyalty solution or a vertical CRM to help their micro- and small-business core segment even further.