Enfuce: Finnish Game-Changers Revitalise Payment Industry

Innovative payment service provider Enfuce, strives for long-term, fast and secure solutions. Just recently they announced My Carbon Action, a pioneering sustainability service for banks, financial service partners and merchants. “We founded Enfuce to enable change and innovation within the financial industry and our service offerings are proof of that,” says CEO and co-founder Denise Johansson.

The five founders had been working at the intersection of payments and digital technologies since the early 2000s. Denise Johansson, Monika Liikamaa, Niklas Apellund, Tom Gråhn and William Ekström met at another payment service provider and decided that they wanted to do things differently.

“Our backgrounds are entirely in the financial industry. We have worked both within the business and IT sides of banks, delivering services to the industry for the past 15 years. This gives us a unique position to really embrace the change our industry needs.”

The founders asked themselves: “If we were to rebuild payments from the get-go, how would we do it?” It quickly became apparent that cloud-based solutions were the best way forward as they offered unrivalled scalability.

“Going to public cloud with payment processing was a bold move in 2016, but we saw no other way to build a scalable solution for the global financial industry. Also the security budget and standard provided by the largest cloud-providers in the world are far more ambitious than any stand-alone company can achieve on its own.”

Acting on their initiative, they founded innovative payment service provider Enfuce in 2016. A week after it was founded, Enfuce pitched – and won – its first account. That was the beginning of a new cloud-based platform. Enfuce was the first company in the world to run a card-issuing platform on the public cloud and to receive PCI DSS (payment card industry data security standard) certification.

“Enfuce is an enabler – we are a hub and integrator that enables our customers to test and launch innovative new payment services,” says Johansson. “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.”

What makes Enfuce stand out is its extensive product range and a platform that is enabled for the whole world: “Thanks to our scalable platform companies could start working with us in Europe for instance and easily expand to Asia or North America.”

By combining industry expertise, collaborative partnerships and compliance, Enfuce is delivering long term solutions fast and secure. They have been breaking records when implementing services to their customers. Enfuce integrated Apple Pay for one customer in just three months – and migrated five million cards in less than three hours for another.

The arrival of Payment services directive (PSD) 2 offered a range of opportunities for the Enfuce team to use its skills and entrepreneurial spirit to explore the era of open banking.

Enfuce Open Banking regulatory service goes further than Application Programming Interface or sandbox test environments. They handle consent management, transaction trails, fraud monitoring, dispute handling and compliance reporting. Enfuce also offers a single point of entry for third party providers (TPPs) to access account information and initiate payments. “I’m so proud of our 100% PSD2 compliant Open Banking API Hub that went live in November when Finland’s first TPP transactions were processed via us,” says Johansson.

Recently, Enfuce partnered-up with D-Mat, a Finnish consultancy experienced in lifestyle carbon and material footprint calculations, and decided to build a solution to help consumers become more carbon-conscious and give individuals accurate feedback based on both purchase history and lifestyle.

“Our goal is to unite consumers with banks, merchants, retailers and financial service partners in the fight against climate change.”

The new sustainability service is called My Carbon Action and is a fully-automated digital tool for banks, other financial service providers and merchants to help their customers track their actual carbon footprint per purchase. The service is offered as a turn-key solution that can be integrated into existing platforms, such as mobile banking applications.

My Carbon Action is based on a validated calculation method called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The calculation takes into account the environmental impacts of a product’s entire lifecycle from raw-material extraction, manufacturing and transport to use and disposal.

The journey for Enfuce has only just started. Enfuce is now Finland’s biggest fintech start-up, and one of the fastest growing fintech companies in the Nordics. In November 2019 Enfuce announced its new funding round of €10m, led by the early-stage VC firm Maki.vc including venture debt from Nordea, LähiTapiola and Finnvera. Enfuce employs over 50 professionals in the Nordics and has more than eight million end-users on its platform.