Double wins for Nordea at the Global Finance Innovators Awards

At the 2021 Innovators Awards organised by Global Finance magazine, Nordea has been named as ‘Outstanding Innovator in Payments’ for the bank’s Consumer Finance API and ‘Outstanding Crisis Finance Innovator in Western Europe’ for developing a real-time overview of collections for a Swedish charity.

The Innovators Awards are now in their ninth annual year and according to Global Finance are intended to shine a spotlight on organisations that “regularly identify new paths and design new tools in finance”.

For 2021, Global Finance added a special category to The Innovators Awards known as ‘Outstanding Crisis Finance Innovation’ to recognise the financial industry’s “extraordinary and agile” response to the Covid-19 pandemic. With this award, Global Finance aims to highlight “innovations launched or introduced in response to the unprecedented conditions in the past year”.

David Lymburn, Chief Operating Officer, GBS at Nordea, says: “Both of the award winning solutions recognised by Global Finance have come to life after great collaboration and co-creation with our partners and across Nordea.”

Peter Hupfeld, Head of Nordea Finance, adds: “By working together and leveraging our combined capabilities, we have shown that we can create outstanding new services, focused on solving our partner’s challenges.”

Erik Zingmark, Head of Transaction Banking at Nordea, says: “In both cases we have shown how Nordea can be a great enabler in helping companies and other organisations into the API economy. Our focus is on meeting the needs of our partners and helping them increase efficiency and improve processes with the help of new technology. We are very pleased with the industry recognition these solutions have achieved. These awards confirm that this is the way to work to continue to be able to provide great services!”

Outstanding Innovator in Payments

Nordea received the Outstanding Innovator in Payments award in recognition of an innovative Open Banking solution know as a Consumer Finance API (Application Programming Interface) developed in collaboration with the airline Finnair. The new solution supports the issuance of a Finnair branded credit card that gives Finnair customers the chance to earn extra loyalty points when making purchases with the card.

Finnair customers filling out an online application for a Finnair Plus Mastercard can now receive a response to their credit application in a couple of seconds and the entire process has been fully automated and digitalised. This is thanks to a new API integration between Nordea Finance and Finnair via Nordea’s Open Banking platform. As a result of this highly innovative collaboration, the previous manual and time consuming application process has been transformed and the customer experience improved.

Outstanding Crisis Finance Innovator in Western Europe

Nordea received the Outstanding Crisis Finance Innovator in Western Europe award in recognition of the bank’s efforts to help the well-known Swedish charity Majblomman keep a real time overview of all incoming donations as they implemented a fully digital campaign. Majblomman raises money annually with the sale of special paper flower pins. When the charity was forced to go digital due to coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions on movement,  Nordea was able to provide Swish as a smooth payment solution to handle real time payments and with a direct integration to the charity’s account, was also able to support with instant updates of the amounts being raised. 

By connecting to Instant Reporting, one of Nordea’s premium API services, Majblomman received direct updates in their system on the latest incoming payments with the required references. With the combination of the Swish mobile payment app as the real time payment method and Nordea’s Instant Reporting API to connect real time transaction information directly into the charity’s platforms, Nordea was able to help the Majblomman create a fully digital user experience for the collectors.

A year of innovations

Joseph D. Giarraputo, publisher and editorial director of Global Finance, says: “Finance innovations proved critical to speeding needed support to different stakeholders during the health care crisis. Fintech developments continue to ease corporate and retail customers’ decision making about what to do with their money as well as their ability to execute the necessary transactions. Our Innovators awards showcase the leading creative issues of the past year.”

In this year’s awards, Global Finance used a multi-tiered assessment process. All selections were made by the editorial board of Global Finance with the input of reporters who are experts on the functions being served by these innovators. Entries were required for consideration.

A full report on The Innovators 2021 will be published in the June 2021print and digital editions of Global Finance and on GFMag.com. 

You can read more about Majblomman, Finnair and embedded finance in general at Nordea in Open Insights: Empowering businesses with Embedded Finance | Nordea