CASE STUDY
M
ore than 2.7 million Norwegians
pay for just about everything with
the Vipps mobile payment app.
In fact, they don’t just send you money in
Norway anymore; now they Vippse it to you.
With that kind of success, the company –
also called Vipps – had to be ready to scale
and innovate, so it used Microsoft Azure
to power and scale its app into a globally
competitive offering. With Azure, Vipps can
scale for success, innovation and value, while
it transforms payments in Norway.
People everywhere have to pay for
everything. They order things online, make
purchases in stores and split lunch cheques
with friends. They move all that money
around in a number of ways. In Norway,
more than 2.7 million people do it with the
Vipps mobile payment app, but that’s not
how they talk about it. Norwegians refer to
transferring money as ‘Vippsing’ money.
Six out of every 10 Norwegians Vippse more
than 400,000 times in an average day. Vipps
holds 98% brand awareness in Norway and
almost every bank in the country supports
the app. And Vipps only launched in mid-
2015. When your brand becomes a verb – in
any language – you’re winning the market.
But you also better be ready to scale and
innovate. That’s why Vipps uses Microsoft
Azure services to power the mobile payment
app and help grow it into a flexible, scalable,
globally competitive offering.
A strong partnership and
accelerated innovation
The Vipps app was originally developed and
launched by DNB, one of the leading savings
banks in Norway. DNB initially ran Vipps
with a monolithic architecture in its own on-
premises infrastructure.
By the end of 2015, the app had more than
a million users and by 2017, it had left all
of its regional competitors far behind. To
maintain pace with its own success and
compete with global mobile-payment
players, DNB partnered with 106 other
Norwegian banks to launch Vipps as an
independent enterprise. The new company
immediately began to rebuild the Vipps
mobile app for a microservice-based cloud
architecture using Azure.
“We turned to Azure to scale Vipps for users
and transactions, accelerate innovation and
expand our product,” said Thomas Wold
Johansen, Chief Technology Officer at Vipps.
WE TURNED
TO AZURE TO
SCALE VIPPS
FOR USERS AND
TRANSACTIONS,
ACCELERATE
INNOVATION AND
EXPAND OUR
PRODUCT.
An advanced cloud platform and new
customer services
Vipps initially migrated its application
infrastructure directly to virtual machines
in Azure. To upgrade its data structure
and get the most out of Azure services, it
also migrated from Oracle to Azure SQL
Database. It then began using Azure API
Management to publish Vipps microservices
to internal developers along with partners
and merchants.
“It was essential for us to maintain business
momentum while we scaled up,” said
Johansen. “We were able to do both by
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