More ways to pay than ever: where Nordic payments are heading

If you sell online in the Nordics, the payments part of your business looks different than it did even six months ago. Have you noticed that almost everything moved at once: providers, methods, owners, and rules? Most of it made the headlines separately. Put together, it adds up to one thing for merchants: more pieces to manage.

Here's what changed, in plain terms, and what it means for your checkout and your back office.

Five shifts worth knowing

Klarna went public. In September 2025, Klarna listed on the New York Stock Exchange. For most merchants the immediate impact is limited — the Klarna button behaves exactly as it did before. The significance lies in what the listing signals. Going public forces a company to open its books and demonstrate a sustainable business, and Klarna's debut marked the moment buy now, pay later moved from a fast-growing upstart category into the financial mainstream. Klarna itself had been a major company for years; the listing is what made it a publicly accountable, closely scrutinised one. And as a sector matures into a serious part of the financial system, regulation tends to follow — which is precisely the theme running through the rest of this piece.

The checkout market is consolidating. First, some context. Back in 2024, Klarna Checkout — the system many Nordic stores already ran — was carved out into an independent company, Kustom. Free to concentrate on the checkout alone rather than sit inside a bank, Kustom has built itself into one of the largest checkout providers in the Nordics, now serving more than 24,000 merchants across 170 markets, with partners including Stripe and Klarna.

The development worth noting is recent. In spring 2026, Kustom acquired Vipps MobilePay's checkout and became the recommended checkout partner for Vipps MobilePay across the Nordics. In effect, the company that grew out of Klarna Checkout brought one of the region's other checkouts under its roof, while Vipps MobilePay narrowed its focus to being a digital wallet. The result is fewer but stronger checkout players, each with deeper payment coverage behind it.

For merchants, the practical impact splits in two. If you're already on Kustom, it's straightforwardly positive: broader payment coverage, Vipps MobilePay included, with no action required on your part. If you were running Vipps MobilePay Checkout, you'll be migrated onto Kustom's platform over the course of 2026 — you land on one of the region's leading checkout providers, but it remains a migration to plan for. Either way, the direction is clear: the checkout layer is settling into fewer, bigger, better-resourced platforms.

Paying straight from the bank account got serious. "Pay by bank" — Swish is the everyday Swedish example — is growing rapidly alongside cards and becoming an expected option in many Nordic checkouts. Around 85% of Swedish adults already use Swish. The big players are consolidating around these rails: TrueLayer completed its acquisition of Nordic specialist Zimpler in March 2026, and Mollie has agreed to acquire GoCardless, a deal expected to close in 2026. For merchants, this is the method your customers increasingly expect to see at checkout.

Two EU rules reset the ground. One is already live: since October 2025, instant euro payments must work around the clock, and banks have to check that a recipient's name matches the account before money moves. The bigger one arrives in November 2026 — the second Consumer Credit Directive (CCD2). It treats BNPL as proper credit, with stricter rules on disclosures, affordability checks, fees. This one touches every instalment and invoice provider at once: Klarna, Qliro, Walley, Svea. It will change what your checkout has to show and collect.

The roles started blurring. Mollie expanded across all four Nordic markets. Walley deepened its tie to Shopify. It launched a Shopify app in December 2025 and has since added multi-currency support, so merchants can sell in several currencies with Walley as the payment partner, directly in Shopify. Processors like Stripe and Adyen are building instalment options right into their checkout. So the same company might now be your card processor, your BNPL option, and your checkout. The neat boxes merchants used to think in don't really hold anymore.

What this means for a merchant

The honest summary: choice went up, and so did complexity.

A year ago you might have run a card processor, one BNPL provider, and a checkout, and called it done. Today the realistic Nordic setup is a mix – cards, Swish, one or two instalment options, a wallet or two – each with its own contract, its own data, and its own quirks. That's good for conversion, because customers pay the way they prefer. It's harder for operations, because every method has to be:

• connected to your store and kept working,

• reconciled correctly so your numbers match,

• kept compliant as the rules change.

CCD2 is the clearest near-term example. When it lands in late 2026, the instalment and invoice options at your checkout will likely need new disclosures and checks. If you've integrated those providers directly, that's work landing on your plate across several of them at the same time.

And here's the part that's easy to miss: when providers merge or change hands, your integration burden moves. Kustom buying Vipps' checkout, Mollie buying GoCardless – these tidy up the provider's world, but the merchant still has to make sure the methods are live, the orders flow into the ERP, and the books reconcile. The 'plumbing' is still yours to manage.

Where this leaves the smart approach

None of this is a reason to panic or to cut payment methods. Offering the right methods is one of the cheapest ways to lift conversion, and Nordic shoppers are specific about how they want to pay. The goal is now not having to hand-build and hand-maintain each connection.

It's worth treating payments as part of one connected system – store, checkout, payment providers, ERP, logistics – rather than a stack of separate integrations you patch one at a time. When a provider changes a field, when a new rule lands, when you add Swish or swap a checkout, you want that to be a configuration change, not a development project.

This is the part Junipeer exists for. We connect your store across all the major e-commerce platforms to the ERPs and payment providers: Svea, Mollie, Walley, Klarna, Kustom, Adyen, Qliro, Shop Pay, Stripe. So adding a method or absorbing a regulatory change doesn't mean rebuilding your back office. As the payments world gets richer and more regulated, the merchants who cope best are the ones who stopped treating every connection as a one-off.

The real payoff comes once your payment providers and your ERP are connected through a single layer. Orders, payments, refunds and settlements then flow into your ERP and reconcile automatically — no re-keying, no manual matching, no month-end scramble — and each new method or rule change is absorbed once, centrally, instead of across a dozen fragile connections. That is what automating the link between checkout, PSP and ERP really buys you: less manual work, fewer errors, and a setup that scales as the payments landscape keeps shifting.