Bitcoin Tracker One is one of the exchange's most active tracking certificates. Stockholm's Nasdaq/OMX exchange has the distinction of listing Bitcoin Tracker One, the world's first (and one of its only) exchange-traded bitcoin financial products.

That being said, it's not as if bitcoin is unpopular in Sweden. Only six out of 2011 Swedes surveyed by the Riksbank used bitcoin to make a payment over the course of the month. If you want an example of a payments revolution, Swish is it-not bitcoin. What happened to the bitcoin payments revolution? So buying 1000 kronor worth of groceries with a credit card doesn't provide any advantages to a debit card. So from a Canadian shopper's perspective, why use you debit card to buy $100 in groceries when you can use you credit card to get the same groceries and also get $2 cash back? Swedes don't face this same payments calculus-low mandated interchange fees mean that credit card can't come equipped with massive amounts of rewards. Swedish banks can't because credit card interchange fees are so low. For debit, they are set at 0.25%.Ĭanadian banks can use the income from credit card interchange fees to fund handsome reward programs and 2% cash back. In Canada, credit card interchange fees vary between 1%-2.5% compared. In Sweden, interchange fees for credit cards are set at 0.3% while debit is 0.2%. An interchange fee is how much a retailer must pay for each transaction that a customer makes using a card.

So why is debit card usage so popular in Sweden? I'd guess low interchange fees. While debit is more popular in the U.S., credit cards aren't far behind. According to a recent Bank of Canada survey, around 39% of all retail payments are made with credit, or 56% of all value spent. So Swish's success (at the expense of cash) probably isn't solely a function of enlightened consumer choice-it also benefited from a gentle nudge from the Riksbank (and the private sector, who advised the central bank).ĭebit card way more popular than credit cardsĬanada is the land of credit cards. Since Swish and banknotes are direct competitors in the P2P payments space, an inconvenient note switch would have given banks quite the helpful tail-wind. This was at the same time that the banks were introducing Swish. The Riksbank chose this timetable because it was recommended to them in 2012 by a collection of private financial institutions including Sweden's big banks. I make this point in an earlier post which I called Swedish betrayal. Due to the inconvenience of the changeover, many more Swedes chose to go cashless than would otherwise have been the case. In the case of the 1000 kroner note, they'd have to do two swaps in five years. Rather than allowing for permanent note switches (like we do in Canada and the US) or a long window (like Sweden did in the 1980s and 1990s), the Riksbank gave Swedes only a year or two to make the swap. By any measure, the timetable that the Riksbank selected for the switch over was inconvenient for cash-users. Swish was introduced in 2012, around the time that Sweden's legacy banknotes were all being scheduled to be replaced by a new issue of notes. Which goes to show that banks aren't always the slow moving monoliths that a lot of people make them out to be. Incidentally, both Zelle and Interac e-Transfer are also owned by banks. Swish was developed by Sweden's banks, not by an upstart tech company. They're a person-to-person (P2P) payments technology. These sort of payments options are not really used much at the point-of-sale. Think Venmo or Zelle in the US, or Interac e-Transfer in Canada. Swish is a mobile payments app that Swedes use to pay each other in real-time and on the weekend. Only 61% of Swedes used cash in the last month, down from 94% just eight years ago. Debit cards are universal, beating out creditĤ.

I made this chart with data from the Riksbank payments survey: :ġ. Sweden is at the forefront of digital payments.

Bitcoin swish