In Denmark, more than 100,000 children in approximately 1,400 schools consume milk as part of their healthy lunch plan every week. While milk is considered a healthy and affordable option to buy in the cafeteria, for many kids, having cash is problematic as schools claim that carrying it leads to a higher risk of petty theft from bullies. Also, parents consider this as an issue as they do not know how the kids are spending their pocket money.
GoAppified, which started as an app development company within the payments space, saw this challenge as something they could solve. The team partnered with one of the Nordics largest dairy products company, Arla, and developed a solution for vending machines where kids’ parents could fill up a digital wallet for their kids to get their milk. Soon after, it was deployed on to 50 machines across Denmark.
The solution was noticed by Danske Bank who then reached out to the founders Patrick, Søren and Mikael to see how the product worked. The question in mind was, “Can GoAppified make a similar solution for cash registers?” Fast forward a year, and the cash register was sold to merchants across Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and, in 2016, it was at every store. As an innovative and agile technology company, they wanted to get ahead of the curve. PSD2 was coming up, and the team foresaw the liberalization of the payments market and breakdown of the monopolies.
“It was a crazy idea at the time, but we decided to build a payment service in the cloud. And we also wanted to be the first one in the world to introduce android on our terminals”
Søren Jensen, Former CEO & Co-founder at GoAppified
Customer experience has been one of the driving forces behind the innovative solutions offered by GoAppified. The team believes that time is everything and saving it for their customers will lead to a better experience. The company has thus spent a lot of time on innovation and product development. They decided to join the Mastercard Lighthouse Program to accelerate sales and look for advice from the program and other fintechs.
Meanwhile, based in Sweden, one of the world’s most digital and cashless societies, Loomis was in a prime position to appreciate the importance of digital payments. In an attempt to follow the playbook of local fintech innovators like Klarna and iZettle, Loomis executives wanted to accelerate the company’s transition away from cash through startup partnerships.
GoAppified and Loomis teams were introduced during the program in the fall of 2019. In May 2020, Loomis’ board approved the purchase of GoAppified and in October, Loomis launched Loomis Pay: a payment platform for small merchants that manages all types of payments both in-store and online. The solution targets Loomis’ 85,000 small merchants—many of which do not currently accept card payments—with a goal of supporting their transition to the digital economy. “The launch of a new digital payment solution is the biggest strategic move we’ve ever made,” CEO Patrik Andersson told team members at the launch.
In the days following the announcement, Kepler Cheuvreux, a Paris-based equity research firm, valued the new payment company at 5.2 billion SEK (610 million USD). With the GoAppified team and technology, Loomis, a cash logistics giant, have built a $610m digital payment company.
Since then, the founders have joined the Loomis team and are seeing their “baby” grow to new dimensions as they now have the financial muscles to get GoAppified technology out into the world, first the Nordics, now the world.
