The Nordic region is among the most cashless in the world, with cash accounting for fewer than 5% of all transactions in Norway and Sweden, and just under 10% in Denmark. While this digital shift brings convenience, it has also made the region an increasingly attractive target for fraudsters, with attempted fraud reaching unprecedented levels in recent years.
Tieto, which offers a variety of solutions across the financial services sector, recently delved into how Nordic banks can cut compliance costs and keep cards safe.
The scale of the problem is significant. Norwegian banks successfully blocked NOK 2.3bn in attempted fraud last year, while Danish banks prevented a record DKK 500m in fraud across 2025 — though the number of affected customers did fall by 7% compared to 2024, according to Tieto.
Tieto Banktech director of sales for Denmark region Nikolai Kjaersgaard Andersen said the challenge for Nordic banks goes beyond fraud prevention alone. Maintaining compliance with regulations such as PCI DSS, DORA and PSD3 carries a significant financial burden — amounting to millions per institution — even as digital-first FinTech competitors, unburdened by legacy infrastructure, continue to erode traditional banks’ competitive ground.
In response, a growing number of banks are turning to Cards as a Service (CaaS) as a way to manage both compliance demands and fraud threats more efficiently, it said. Unlike traditional in-house card management, CaaS providers absorb much of the operational and regulatory workload, giving banks predictable costs and reduced internal complexity. A multi-tenant model means that the expense of security and compliance investment is spread across all participants, lowering the burden for each individual institution while still allowing them to access tailored services — whether card personalisation, virtual cards, multi-function cards, or other offerings.
Tieto Banktech says it has worked with more than 250 financial institutions across Europe and beyond. Its CaaS platform currently supports more than 14 million active cards, maintains 99.99% uptime for authorisation availability, and processes more than 11 million transactions daily at thousands of transactions per second.
The company also highlights its track record in portfolio migration, citing the ability to re-issue hundreds of thousands of cards within weeks at a near-zero error rate, as well as the ongoing management of a single multi-country portfolio of more than five million cards for one provider.
For banks of all sizes, CaaS represents a route to launching and managing card programmes with greater speed, flexibility and confidence — allowing institutions to remain secure and compliant while focusing on growth and customer experience in an increasingly competitive market.
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