Nordic challenger Lunar has managed to raise another €40 million in funding and is about to launch a BNPL product.
This funding comes from previous investors and is following a €20 million round in April as Lunar prepared to open its first business banking accounts for Danish sole traders.
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Lunar has also announced it will use the cash to expand its business banking offering and its consumer credit products. Lunar has set its sights on the “buy now, pay later” market.
Lunar founder and CEO Ken Villum Klausen says the “schizophrenic” Nordic banking market is the reason why the challenger is launching BNPL. “It’s the most profitable banking landscape in the world, but also the most defensive, with least competition from the outside,” he says. “This means that the traditional banking customer is buying all their financial products from their bank”.
It is within this context that Lunar’s BNPL products are built as “post-purchase,” where Lunar will prompt its users after they have bought something (not dissimilar to Curve’s planned credit offering). For example, if you were to buy a new television, the app will ask if you want to split the purchase into instalments. “This does not require merchant agreements etc, and will work on all transactions both retail and e-commerce,” explained Klausen to TechCrunch.
Since Lunar’s launch in 2015 in Denmark, Lunar has attracted over 200,000 personal customers and 5,000 business users across Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
“Now more than ever people need to manage both their business and personal finances conveniently and with tools to make the most of their money. That is why we are building one app that will break up the monopoly-like Nordic banking infrastructure,” says Ken Villum Klausen.
