Also:

• 🎊 Year in review

• 💳 Apple partnering with Stripe

• 🖼 The first NFT project in the Norwegian financial industry comes to an end

• 1️⃣ How to design badges

• 👨‍💼 Don't bet against Microsoft

🎊 Year in review

I'm going to start this week with a little plug: I've written about some of the projects that our department in Stacc has worked on (and can talk about) over the last year:

Stacc X - Year in review 2021 — stacc.com

🤳 Biometric BankID incoming

BankID and BankAxept are leaving Vipps faster than originally planned. Already April 1st, they plan to be their own company. In the meantime, they are working on replacing BankID on mobile with an app, finally enabling biometric BankID.

We're often saying that Norway is in front of bank infrastructure globally. Still, the lack of biometric authentication on our national ID solution is one of Nicolai Hope Møllers, UX Lead at Bulder Bank, appeal points in his comparison of the bank infrastructure in Norway and Denmark. Nicolai compares handling of accounts, mortgage, payment agreements, Apple/Google Play, and the national ID solution. In the end, the Danes win in an article written by a Dane. 😜

💳 Apple partnering with Stripe

We mentioned that Apple might be working on a new service to accept payments straight from an iPhone two weeks ago. This week Apple unveiled their Tap to Pay solution on iPhone. Stripe will be the first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to their business customers, including the Shopify Point of Sale app this spring. Additional payment platforms and apps will follow later this year. Will we see Vipps as one of the actors here?

It will also be interesting to see how they handle fraud detection considering anyone with enough resources suddenly has a potential card reader in their pocket.

While we're on the topic of payments, Amazon's threat to ban Visa from their UK stores seems to be resolved. The online retailer said it was "working closely with Visa on a potential solution" in an email to customers. It remains to be seen if Visa budged on Amazon's demand to lower their fees.

🖼 The first NFT project in the Norwegian financial industry comes to an end

Sparebank 1 completes its first (and last? 🙊) crypto art project. We first mentioned the project about a year ago, which probably was the first NFT project in the Norwegian financial industry. February 7th, the project ended, but you can still buy and sell digital Svalbard notes on the secondary market. Read more about the project on Svalbard.money.

I find it interesting that one of the largest bank alliances in Norway is testing out concepts like this and being open to that blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and NFTs gradually can become more essential elements in the financial sector itself. If that happens, Sparebank1 has potentially positioned itself wisely.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, is at the same time dabbling with the concept of soulbound or non-transferable NFTs. The idea is rather interesting when you think of Proof of Attendance, Passports, Driver licenses, or similar, but the question is if everything needs to be stored in your blockchain wallet(s).

To round off these wide-ranging paragraphs on tokens, Evan Armstrong has written about if tokens will replace equity and why token sales it is both 10x worse and 10x better than equities

1️⃣ How to design badges

Badges are a useful design tool to get users' attention, whether you need to indicate a new notification, new eFaktura, or a new change. Roman Kamushken has written a thorough walkthrough of using this small design detail.

👨‍💼 Don't bet against Microsoft

Despite its scale, Microsoft is one of the most overlooked companies in tech. It is not a beloved consumer brand like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but there is more to Microsoft than meets the eye. Azure is probably the fastest B2B product of all time to reach $10 Billion in revenue and would be one of the largest standalone companies in the world today.

This week we came across two articles diving more into how Microsoft has worked over the years:

• Don't forget Microsoft

• When Microsoft Office Went Enterprise

That's it for this week 👋

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X