Swiss Twint, a mobile payment application (app) developed by a Zagreb-based software company, has made a strong impression in the EU.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 10th of September, 2019, Zagreb’s Q Software, according to Deloitte, is the third fastest growing high-tech company in Central Europe and among the twenty fastest growing in the whole of Europe, and they’re now expecting new jobs thanks to a new type of roaming.
Following the introduction of mobile roaming in telecommunications imposed by the European Commission (EC), Swiss banks have now initiated the next major business alignment in the EU – voluntary mobile roaming.
Twint, a Swiss competitor to Apple Pay and Google Pay, which is beating them in the country thanks to major Swiss banks, such as UBS and Credit Suisse, and has more than one million users, gathered its competitors in the EU and founded the European Mobile Payment Systems Association (EMPA).
The aim of Twint, which is being developed by Zagreb’s Q Software company right here in Croatia, is for mobile payment systems to support one another and offer a predictable level of service, as with mobile services in the EU. Filip Ljubić, co-founder and CEO of Q Software, says they have had a strategic partnership with Twint for several years now.
The Zagreb company, from here in Croatia, is in fact leading the entire development of the Twint application, and until recently it was its largest client. “Any expansion or success of them, as a rule, means new jobs for Q, but what exactly this initiative will bring to us, we’ll have to wait to see more of because this is only an emerging initiative,” says Ljubić.
Twint has brought together companies from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, including Sweden’s Swish, at EMPSA. It is one of Europe’s most successful mobile payment platforms, launched seven years ago by six major banks in Sweden in cooperation with the national clearing system Bankigrot and the Central Bank of Sweden.
Today, it has more than six million users and is also known for its QR payment method, the same QR code that should become standard in fiscal accounts here in Croatia over the next two to three years. The German Bluecode, which also joined EMPSA in Germany and Austria, has already contracted cooperation with about a hundred banks, and now the first partner from Southern Europe to join the initiative, who sees this as an opportunity because of tourists – this is Portugal’s SIBS.
In total, EMPSA represents 25 million mobile payment users, who already use the services of 350 banks and can pay at more than one million points of sale. Q Software in Zagreb points out, however, that despite its size, Twint is no longer their largest client.
They have a lot of work in the fintech industry and are in intense talks about working with Swiss UBS. A new big opportunity opened up for them in the United Kingdom because of their pension reforms there.
“Our biggest fintech client is ‘Smart’, which is currently perhaps one of the fastest growing fintech companies in the City of London and whose president is the former mayor of London. We have a team of about ten different experts who are part of Smart,” concluded Filip Ljubić.
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