The Best of Show-winning mobile wallet platform from Memento has been successfully deployed by Iceland’s Islandsbanki. The Icelandic bank has added the technology to its digital wallet app, Kass, enabling users to create “money pools” that friends and family privately or publicly can contribute to.
The technology treats each contribution as a “dynamic payment event” without a preset number of potential contributors nor a predetermined total amount. This makes it easy for users to raise money and share the “campaign” via the social network of their choice. Now available to anyone with an Icelandic phone number and bank account, the technology can be used for everything from funding a team lunch or raising money for charitable causes. And because users have their payment details stored on the digital wallet, contributing to a money pool takes only a few seconds.
Arnar Jónsson, CEO of Memento, demonstrating the company’s Bank-to-Social Relationship Platform at FinovateEurope 2017.
Memento CEO Arnar Jónsson said the money pool feature “will not only increase the use cases of wallet platforms, but also drive traffic from many social media straight to these wallet services.” Pointing out that this value-add is a way for banks to differentiate themselves in an “enormously competitive” digital wallet marketplace, Jónsson added, “it is a smart move to provide tools to pool money as it will raise awareness and usability of your digital wallet.”
This news is the culmination of two years of collaboration between Memento and Islandsbanki, a partnership that included the development of the bank’s digital wallet, Kass, which won “App of the Year in Iceland 2016. “Islandsbanki has high ambitions to offer the best digital-wallet service and we value the strong partnership we’ve build with Memento,” Kass Product Manager at Islandsbanki Unnur Johnsen said. He added, “We truly share their vision to bridge the gap between social media and banking and to service a digital wallet that can handle any type of payment needs. The money pool feature is part of that vision.”
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland, Memento demonstrated its Bank-to-Social Relationship platform at FinovateEurope 2017, winning Best of Show. The company has more than $450,000 in capital courtesy of a grant in 2016 from the Technology Development Fund.