Bringing Apple Pay to Finland with the St1 Way app

St1 is a Nordic energy group with operations in Finland, Sweden, Norway and the UK, best known for its network of more than a thousand retail stations. In 2017, the group expanded into financial services with St1 Finance – and one of its very first products was a Mastercard built for the mobile age, available through the St1 Way app.

When Apple Pay arrived in Finland on 24 October 2017, only two financial institutions in the country were ready to support it: Nordea and St1 Finance. Qvik helped make that possible, by building the mobile infrastructure behind St1 Way and the Apple Pay integration that let customers apply for a card in the app and start paying with their iPhone the same day, no plastic card required.

Smooth payments have become the foundation of how people use their phones day to day. At the time of launch, iPhones held roughly 28% of the Finnish mobile market, so adding Apple Pay reached a substantial share of the country's mobile users and gave St1 Finance a clear differentiator as a brand-new entrant in a crowded market.

"Paying with Apple Pay was more secure than tapping a contactless card, because the payer was authenticated with the phone's fingerprint or facial recognition," said Matias Pietilä, Head of Design at Qvik. The security mattered in practical terms too: standard contactless card payments in Finland were capped at 25 euros at the time, while Apple Pay purchases through St1 Finance had no monetary limit.

"Finland had such a robust contactless payment infrastructure that adopting Apple Pay was easy for users," Pietilä said.

Setting up Apple Pay was nearly effortless, provided the user's card issuer was an Apple partner. The Wallet app appeared automatically on compatible iPhones, and adding a card took a single photo. With St1 Way, even that step was simplified: customers could apply for the card and provision it straight from the app, skipping the wait for a physical card altogether.

"The number of Apple Pay-compatible cards in Finland was limited at launch, but you could get one quickly through St1 Way without waiting for a physical card to arrive," Pietilä said.