In June, Vipps and Bluecode joined a consortium with four other European mobile wallets and China’s Alipay to adopt a unified QR code format to provide seamless and enhanced services to travelers, expats and merchants. “With EMPSA, we are now taking a significant step towards enabling it, while also strengthening our European collaboration between wallets,” Wretman said.ĮMPSA is the latest initiative in Europe focusing on digital payment interoperability.

Twint supports online and in-store payments, as well as peer-to-peer transfers, and is accepted in practically all major retail stores in Switzerland, including Coop, Migros, Spar and Volg, as well as the mobility sector, allowing for payments to be made with the SBB, BLS, many private railway networks, Fairtiq, TCS and the largest provider of electric charging stations “evpass”.Īnna-Lena Wretman, vice chairwoman of EMPSA and CEO of Swish, said the ability to carry out Swish payments outside of Sweden was “a high priority among our seven million users.” Twint, a joint venture between Switzerland’s biggest banks including UBS and Credit Suisse, is Switzerland’s leading mobile payment system, recording some 1.7 million users and around 4 million transactions made every month. Twint CEO Markus Kilb believes the initiative will help promote the interoperability and international use of the mobile payment systems and “establish a genuine European alternative means of payment.”

Søren Mose, chairman of EMPSA and chairman of the Twint board of directors, said that with this international cooperation, the company wants to “accommodate our users’ wishes of also being able to use the tried-and-tested systems internationally.” This also means that Switzerland’s Twint will be usable in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Finland, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden and Norway.ĮMPSA has already set up a working group co-chaired by Bjørn Skjelbred from Vipps and Christian Pirkner of Bluecode to review the technical issues surrounding interoperability. In practice, this means that, for example, a Twint user from Switzerland would be able to travel to Sweden and pay for goods at any story accepting Swish directly through the Twint app.

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