Vipps, the Norwegian payment service owned by DNB, gets spunoff, owned by 106 banks.

Vipps, a Norwegian payment service owned by DNB, Norway's largest financial services group, was partly sold to a group of more than 100 Norwegian banks. The move comes as a bid to block competition from Nordic rival platforms and the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple.

Vipps is a P2P mobile payment app developed by DNB and counts about 2.15 million individual users in the country and more than 30,000 corporate customers. On average 204,000 transactions are carried out daily.

DNB, the SpareBank 1 alliance, the Eika alliance, Sparebanken Møre and the 15 independent savings banks which also are co-owners of Frende Forsikring have signed a letter of intent, to jointly acquire a 48% stake in the mobile payment service.The initiators together represent 106 Norwegian banks.

Initially developed by Norway's biggest bank DNB , Vipps competes with MobilePay, developed by Denmark's Danske Bank and which is also backed by top Nordic bank Nordea.

In October 2016 Danske Bank had more than 3.1 million users in Denmark, which has a population of about 5.7 million. Its app had been downloaded some 300,000 times in Norway at the time.

DNB will retain a 52% controlling interest in Vipps, which will be spun off as an autonomous joint venture. Under the agreement, the SpareBank 1 alliance will own 25%, the independent savings banks 12%, the Eika alliance 10% and Sparebanken Møre one per cent. SpareBank 1 will transfer its mobile payment service mCASH, which delivers many of the same services as Vipps over to the new company.

The agreement is subject to approval from Norwegian authorities.