Also:

• ♿️ Web Accessibility Statement

• 🏝️Dynamic Island

• 👀 Consolidation wave incoming?

🦾 Digitisation of society - a public health problem?

DNB is getting 50 000 NOK in fines every day because they have breached the Money Laundering Act by not obtaining identification from many customers. We don't hear much about this when we weekly write about digital advances, but collecting identification from everyone is a more complex, nuanced case than the Financial Supervisory Authority seems to let on.

An example of this is Turid Aas Lundby, at almost 80 years old, that don't have a passport or driver's license but has been a customer in Ås Sparebank since the 70s and has been loyal through multiple mergers until she had an account with DNB. DNB has closed her account because she hasn't relegitimized herself. More accurately, they have closed her account because they didn't manage to fill out the appropriate fields in their database as dictated by the Financial Supervisory Authority. I can imagine Turid having legitimized herself for the bank many times from the 70s and up until now. But how often should you need to prove that you are you to the bank?

I get that banks need to follow KYC- and AML regulations, but there should probably also be an easier regulation for decade-long customers approaching retirement. Alice Moræus has written that the digitization of society is becoming a public health problem for The Authority for Universal Design of ICT. One of the main problems is that we often don't have reasonable backup solutions for a large proportion of the population who do not have sufficient digital skills; as I've rambled on before, there probably is a large market for a senior bank in Norway.

♿️ Web Accessibility Statement

Speaking of accessibility, Fredrik Matheson (Creative director at Bekk) has written an excellent Cheat sheet on WCAG requirements and accessibility statements that are required reading if you create self-service solutions, websites, apps, or anyting else:

A cheat sheet on WCAG requirements and accessibility statements — blogg.bekk.no

🏝️ Dynamic Island

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Apple fans that raved about Apple's newest iPhone and the new feature: Dynamic Island. If you wonder what all the hype is about, it is that the designers made a technical hardware limitation (the camera and sensors in the middle of the screen) into a software feature. Here is a video to show it in practice:

My colleague and designer extraordinaire, Eivind Kjellevold, couldn't keep his hand away from Figma in excitement and drew out these beautiful sketches of Fintech apps in the Norwegian ecosystem. Which one is your favorite?

You can see more examples in his LinkedIn-post here.

👀 Consolidation wave incoming?

We wrote more than a year ago that a bank consolidation wave was inevitable. This week we saw two significant moves in that direction:

Storebrand buys Kron

Storebrand puts 400 million NOK on the table and takes over the savings and investment Fintech company Kron. The reason is probably that Kron has managed to capture 70 000 customers (and NOK 7 billion in savings) in a market with relatively little movement outside the big players. Quite impressive by a niche player! It will be interesting to see if Kron manages to keep their challenger position and if Storebrand leverages its new position to cross-sell bank products or insurance.

Visma invests in Aprila Bank

Visma spends NOK 22.5 million and buys just under five percent of Aprila Bank. In the same agreement, the Visma Group's less than-a-year-old Norwegian financing company Visma Finance is also taken over by Aprila Bank. The most interesting part here is probably that it is nine months since Visma Finance in Norway was launched, following a model Visma in Sweden uses. Steffen Torp, commercial director in Visma, says that the change of strategy happened because Visma concluded that their customers do not have the same faith in Visma as a bank as they have in them as a supplier of financial systems. Therefore, it was not strategically correct for them to continue with banking but rather invest in a partner.

That's it for this week 👋

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X