Today, a banking alliance made up of Norwegian payment app giant Vipps and others reportedly hopes the EU will launch antitrust action against Apple if they don’t turn on NFC technologies and grant access to tap-and-go technologies without restrictions. Vipps CEO Rune Harborg said other companies could be more competitive.

Harborg’s comments come a day after Apple made a final effort to convince EU antitrust officials in a closed hearing that it wasn’t preventing rivals from accessing its technology used for mobile wallets. Whipps was the third party at the trial.

Vipps, which is owned by a consortium of Norwegian banks and merged with its Danish counterpart, MobilePay, last year, said the issue is critical given Apple’s popularity in Scandinavia and the growing use of mobile payments running on near field communication technology (NFC). .

“It’s really important to us. Seventy-eight percent of card transactions in Norway are done through terminals. That’s why NFC is so important, especially among young people,” Harborg told Reuters.

“Apple only shares NFC with banks that have to pay to load their cards into Apple Pay. But for us as a wallet, we don’t have open access to NFC,” he said. For more, read the full Reuters report.

In October 2016, Australian banks, along with Fintech Australia, went on the attack for forcing Apple to turn on NFC technology, and a month later the opportunity to force Apple to open the Apple Pay API on its own terms was denied.

Of course, with the EU Commission on its way to war with US tech companies with the Digital Services Act enacted in 2024, the outcome could be significantly different this time around than in Australia. We will follow up when the EU Commission makes its decision public in the coming weeks or months. Meanwhile, Apple has reportedly offered former Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde a position for the company’s non-US advisory body.

In a report for the Swedish government, Linde wrote: “The current advisory board consists of people with experience in politics, civil society and business and is tasked with assisting Apple Inc. in analyzing and evaluating global trends. It does not involve any lobbying and is not the task of the board of directors. “