Meet ‘The Enabler’

Enfuce Cofounders Denise Johansson and Niklas Apellud on how Finnish tech is changing the world of payments

Enfuce became Finland’s biggest fintech startup by revenue in 2018. In a respectably profitable 12 months, it turned over €4.1million.

The universal nature of its services means Enfuce can operate wherever in the world that banking and electronic payment licences are available. That’s pretty much everywhere that uses alternatives to cash. And that is certainly well beyond its dynamic, but comparatively small, home market.

The infinitely scalable nature of its cloud-based payment services was one of the reasons that International Smart Card, one of the biggest providers of electronic financial transaction services in the Middle East, renewed and extended an initial one-year partnership with Enfuce. The fintech went on to successfully conduct the largest card migration in the region of ISC’s entire stock of close to six million cards, all executed remotely from Finland. This was a critical undertaking because ISC’s electronic payment system pays public sector salaries, benefits and pensions to millions of people, providing them access to their cash via its Qi debit card.

The contract is a testament to the scale, integrity and fast execution of the services that Enfuce provides, says chief executive officer and cofounder Denise Johansson. “Enfuce is the enabler. We are both hub and integrator,” she explains. “We can enable any player in the payments ecosystem to launch any service they want. It could be a consumer credit, debit or prepaid card; a corporate or fleet card; or tokenised payments. We have the full range of services and the platform to deliver them.”

Chief technology officer and cofounder Niklas Apellund adds: “We’ve enabled payments on a global level for massive organisations, from big banks and financial institutions, and also for the little guys who want to dip a toe into the market and see if a product will fly. If it does, we can scale it for them using our pay-as-you-go business model. All this means we can make seamless payments available for everyone.”

Enfuce envisions the volume and variety of payment methods only increasing and with it an expanding role for the company, as Apellund puts it, to ‘enable these players to
build an ecosystem because that’s where you make new, improved services, for consumers’.

Enfuce was the first payment services company to launch Apple Pay in the Nordics, which Johansson believes is an example of the level of innovation in payments that has occurred despite the need for payment rails to evolve along with the products. “The technology has been around for decades,” she says. “It’s how products are packaged and how they’re sold to consumers that has changed.”

And therein is still an infinite opportunity, particularly in the area of corporate payments. Statistics from the Innovation Readiness Playbook suggest that 74 percent of financial institutions offer corporate credit products and 94 percent are developing new products or planning to do so in the next year. Among top-performing financial institutions, 86.7 percent are already investing in corporate credit innovation. The attraction? This relatively uncrowded space is a lucrative one already delivering significant revenue to organisations with room for expansion. Yet businesses can struggle technologically to capitalise on this opportunity, given the more complex nature of such cards, which often need to be accessed by multiple users in one organisation and used for a range of purposes including supplier payments and expenses management, delivered with instant approval and digital issuing.

“The infrastructure for consumer payments and corporate payments is the same,” says Johansson, “And, as a business owner, I would like to see more integrated payments for corporates. Enfuce has the platform for anyone that wants to embrace that change. We see huge market potential, globally, in helping the industry issue payment cards and at the same time improve their security and fraud prevention,” adds Johansson. “Corporates have been behind in terms of the security elements within their cards, so transaction fraud has been increasing over a considerable period of time.”

On the wider subject of security and compliance, Enfuce stands firm: “We don’t compromise,” says Apellund.

“When you look at how we sell our service and how our customer data is handled, different countries and different customers have different requirements,” adds Johansson. “We need to follow each and every one of them. Security in the cloud is handled by ourselves and Amazon Web Services. Then, there are variances, such as with multi-currency payments, which are configurable within our system to enable global-level processing.”

“There are two things separating us from other providers of these services and these are the aces up our sleeves for global expansion,” says Johansson. “One is the product range, where we enable everything from prepaid to debit, credit and instalment, to fleet cards. The second is that our platform is enabled for the whole world. A company could start working with us in Europe and expand to Canada, Australia or Japan, with the same core platform. That is unique.”

From their position at the top of a Finnish tech peak, viewing the whole world of payments, where do they see the future going? “More seamless payments, fast transactions, wherever I want to do them,” says Johansson, a self-confessed addict of Apple Pay on Apple Watch. “Payment products where I can make a purchase but then switch the payment method to one that gives me more benefits – one that offers me purchase insurance or better interest for a payment made by credit, for instance.
I also see more ecoins, new currencies, being used in everyday transactions. What will it be? We’ll see.”

And what will crypto do to its business model? “It will certainly affect the way we pay,” says Apellund, “yet, as an integrator hub, we are in a neutral position in that ecosystem. We can handle it… no problem.”