When it comes to mortgages, the banks are all fighting for the best customers: Secure payers with a good economy and a low probability of loss. Nordnet is targetting this group with their new mortgage solution. Rather than letting the loan to value ratio define your interest rate, as Bulder Bank does dynamically, what determines your interest rate is how much money you have invested at Nordnet. They even include your pension or companies you own into the invested amount (including co-borrowers). This is a smart move since all their new mortgages have a low-risk profile. On top of that, they recruit well-off people to their platform and cross-sell their core business to make the offer on mortgage better.

The downside of innovations like this for users is that it’s getting harder and harder to compare different actors for the Consumer Council in Norway.

Last week we wrote that The Competition Appeals Board reverted the Norwegian Competition Authority’s decision to stop DNB’s acquisition of Sbanken. This week they got their second scorching defeat: When Schibsted bought the digital car dealer Nettbil, the Norwegian Competition Authority and The Competition Appeals Board stopped the transaction. They ended up suing the Competition Authority for this decision, and last week won in court. Lucas Weldeghebriel from Shifter notes that: “In this case, they reveal that their understanding of digital business models and markets is somewhat limited.” 

Some actors are hard to classify. Is Facebook a social media company, a VR-company, an online shopping, dating, donation, advertising, or payment? Is Apple a technology company, an app store, a search-engine platform, or a payment company?

Last week Apple acquired the British credit-scoring startup Credit Kudos. The deal is another addition to Apple’s venture into the expanded payments space. Altfi speculates if the agreement could be an indication of Apple launching their Apple Card in the UK, a venture into “Buy Now, Pay Later” or an acquihire. Nontheless, Apple has a habit of acquiring companies and then going into silent mode for two years before hearing something more. We can expect the same thing to happen here.

How secure is the password you have chosen? Hive systems have updated their Hive Systems Password Table for 2022: 

Suddenly, you get why most password-prompts are annoyingly asking you to add numbers, lower and uppercase letters, and symbols to your passwords.

We’ve all seen these dull presentations. Heck, I regularly try to wipe them out from our sales slides. But we’re getting so used to seeing these slides filled with text that we accept them. The fact is we know that PowerPoint kills. Often it only kills our interest, but this is a story of how a PowerPoint slide actually helped kill seven people:

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X