LIVE FROM MONEY 2020 EUROPE, COPENHAGEN: Torsten Hagen Jorgensen, Nordea’s Deputy CEO, said the adoption of mobile in retail banking is happening “at a speed we have never seen before”, as the Swedish banking giant faces radical transformation from digital technology.

The executive acknowledged “we are in the midst of major change” over the next five years.

“All we can do is to be more innovative and agile than incumbent banks sometimes seem,” he added. Nordea just launched a mobile wallet in Finland, which it intends to rollout to other Nordic countries. It wants to see more and more of the 1.6 billion transactions it handles every year moving to mobile devices and away from plastic cards.

“The fundamental change is we have to be digital end-to-end,” he added, not just for its customers but also to attract partners from among fintech firms.

Jan Madsen, COO of leading retailer Coop Denmark, took up a similar theme in the opening session at the show, billed as being about cross sector collaboration.

Owned by its own customers, the retailer has a particular interest in engaging more closely with users through its loyalty programme. “Our core belief is we are going through a digital transition. Why re-engineer? Today we use a card, it’s a very simple system. With digital we can build relationships and remove friction. It’s a demand from our customers,” said Madsen.

“Some solutions we will try and they will fail. If it does succeed then we will carry on with it,” he added. The retailer sees one million transactions in shops every day, and is witnessing a distinct shift from card transactions to mobile devices. “It’s nice to move in that direction,” he said.