Danish pension fund Velliv fully implements open banking payments with Aiia

As the rise of open banking use cases and payments rapidly increases, the European open banking platform Aiia has partnered with one of the largest commercial pension companies in the Nordics, Velliv. Velliv now offers more than 360.000 customers open banking payments to top up pension funds instantly and more cost-efficiently than possible with traditional card payments.

After a successful proof of concept in the end of 2020, Velliv has decided to move fully ahead with open banking payments from Aiia. During the months of trying Aiia’s payment platform, Velliv experienced that customers preferred paying with their bank account.

With a recent survey predicting that real-time account-to-account payments will be one of the three most popular payment methods in 2022, and account for 29 percent of all transactions in 2027, Velliv takes an important step with the new open banking collaboration.

Commenting on the partnership, Steen Michael Erichsen, CEO of Velliv, said “Velliv are owned by the costumers, and therefore we always aim to have the customers in focus in all out touchpoints. Aiia provides a customer friendly solution, that makes it’s possible to make payments instant and directly from our self-service platform. In Velliv we always try to team up with the most innovative and best suppliers in order to live up to customer expectations” he says and continues “Our customers also have the opportunity to use their credit cards to make deposits to their pension funds. But as credit cards often have a limit of 100,000 DKK, it’s often better to do an account-to- account payment to make the deposit. With that, customers are now able to deposit up to 500,000 DKK by paying directly with their bank account,”.

Commenting on the partnership, Rune Mai, CEO of Aiia, said “Open banking payments are taking off across different industries. It’s with great pleasure to see Velliv become one of the first Nordic pension funds to leverage the opportunities of offering a faster and more secure payment option in an interface the users know and trust. With open banking payments, there’s no need for pension customers to go to their online bank to transfer money manually. Now they can simply top-up Velliv pension deposits directly from their bank inside Vellivs environment. With increasing consumer demand, we expect to see more similar cases in this sector in 2021.”

Aiia and Velliv will continue the collaborations and are already looking into adding open banking to other business areas of Velliv’s during the year.