PARTNER NEWS: Iceland’s Arion Bank has added NFC mobile payments to its mobile banking app — a key step, the bank has told What’s New in Payments, towards achieving its goal of ensuring the app’s status as the country’s leading all-in-one mobile financial service.

The bank is using Dejamobile’s ReadyToTap Payments platform to add NFC payments to its Android mobile banking app and worked with payments solution provider Valitor to deliver the project.

Arion Bank is a full service financial institution and is Iceland’s leading digital bank. The bank sees the addition of NFC payments as critical to serving the needs of its customers, Iða Brá Benediktsdóttir, the bank’s managing director of retail banking, told What’s New in Payments.

“It is very important for us to be able to provide our customers with the ability to pay with their mobile phones,” she explained.

“We looked into several solutions and chose Valitor and Dejamobile because they were able to provide us with a simple way to build NFC payments into our mobile banking app, rather than having to introduce a separate app just for payments.

“We want to maintain our status as the leading financial app of Iceland. Including mobile payments within the app is a key part of achieving that.

“We would happily recommend both Dejamobile and Valitor to other banks looking to include NFC payments in their mobile app,” Benediktsdóttir said.

“We found the teams very helpful and easy to work with and the project ran smoothly, even when we made a change to the spec along the way. The cost was also acceptable.”

“Valitor is thrilled to be helping Arion Bank deliver this leading edge-solution to their cardholders and we look forward to working with Dejamobile on more projects in the future,” adds Nína Thrastardóttir, program manager at Valitor.

“The launch of NFC payments by Arion Bank is a perfect example of how local partners like Valitor can leverage our in-app NFC mobile payments technology to help their customers add value to their mobile banking apps,” says Lorcan Burke, chief growth officer at Dejamobile.

“We’re proud of our partnership with Valitor and Arion Bank and look forward to building on our joint successes.”