Estonia, Financial Services, Legislation, Technology, Telecomunications

The manager of Tele2 Estonia, Argo Virkebau, said the company has half a million customers and their goal is to start offering them also other services besides telecom services.

"For instance, we launched mobile payments all over Estonia in April where the customer is charged with the monthly bill," Virkebau said in a press release, adding that Tele2 is planning to come up with one more significant new payment solution shortly.

Virkebau described mobile payments as a convenient alternative to traditional means of payment both at regular stores and on the internet and said Tele2 is ready to take the creditor risk. "Smartphones are playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives and services and payments are moving to mobile devices too," he said.

"We are planning to handle 100 million euros' worth of mobile payments in 2020 and I predict that the total value of mobile payments in Estonian retail will be one billion euros by that time," Virkebau said.

He said obtaining the creditor authorization enables the company to be more useful to the client by offering new technologies and financial products.

"To get the license, we made several procedural changes in the company that enable us to better assess the possibilities and needs of each individual client when it comes to the consumption of financial products," Virkebau said.

"We will be reporting to the Financial Supervision Authority on a regular basis. Broadly speaking, for us this is a step closer to the banks," the manager of Tele2 said.

Tele2 announced last week that it has started testing a payment solution with the mobile payments platform Worapay that allows to pay the bill using a mobile phone at 35 catering establishments in Estonia. Currently the total value of the bills that a customer can pay this way is capped at 200 euros a month.