MPE 2026: SOK’s Payments Strategy in Finnish Retail

Kai Lindström, Vice President of Payments at SOK, sat down at MPE 2026 to discuss the Finnish retail giant’s payments strategy. SOK, Finland’s largest retail group and part of the Coop Alliance, and operates across grocery, hospitality, traffic services, and even has its own bank, giving them a broad view of the payments landscape.

The immediate focus for SOK is a large-scale migration: replacing over 12,000 point-of-sale terminals across more than 2,000 locations as part of moving to Adyen services and this major project is already halfway complete, though Lindström noted that getting long-time customers to adjust to the new terminal model is proving to be a challenge.

A bigger headache, however, lies in e-commerce, specifically with the pay-by-bank payment method as the issue stems from some banks not having fully up-to-date open banking interfaces. This leads to the inconvenient situation where a customer’s payment is initially declined, but the bank charges the money a day or two later. The e-commerce store thinks the transaction failed, but the customer is left calling customer service wondering why their money was taken.

To solve this, Lindström and his team are working on multiple fronts and their number one preference is using the Thinc by Visa service, but this currently uses a Dutch IBAN (starting with NL) to collect funds, which confuses Finnish customers who expect a domestic FI IBAN. Since that solution isn’t ready yet, they are utilizing another Adyen-supported open banking provider, which is unfortunately where most of the current decline/charge issues are occurring. Lindström confirmed they are working hard to resolve the API issues with the problematic banks to stabilize the service.

Looking ahead, Lindström highlighted several key trends he is focused on and hoping to learn more about at MPE. Unsurprisingly, AI is at the top of the list, especially for applications like fraud management, reporting, and analytics to better understand payment trends and customer card usage. Lindström also mentioned the emerging topic of agentic commerce (where AI agents conduct transactions autonomously) and confirmed SOK had just held its first internal workshop on the subject. This aligns with broader industry discussions about the impact of AI on merchant payments.

Furthermore, Lindström is heavily invested in Account-to-Account (A2A) payments, driven by European resiliency and sovereignty goals. The objective is to match the superior customer experience already delivered by payment types like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Finally, SOK is exploring the potential of stablecoins, not for typical point-of-sale use, but for back-office and cross-border payments to product providers and importers, where he believes significant money savings could be realized. The Buy Now, Pay Later trend is also on the radar.

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