Do you know the feeling that you pay for other people and you have to wait for such a long time before you receive your money back? Sometimes that must be a really frustrating feeling! Luckily, the Dutch bank ABN AMRO found a way to easily request and receive money without exchanging your bank account details. They released Tikkie, a free mobile payment app, in the middle of 2016. In only one week they had over 25.000 users and currently they have over 3 million. These users have already exchanged an abundantly amount of 1 billion euros in two years.
Multiple other Dutch banks created add-ons in their mobile apps for payment requests, but they are not even close to the success of Tikkie. Tikkie has reached this year a market share of 86%. However they want more. The past year they started to cooperate with a few supermarkets, a big airline and 540 other companies, which increased Tikkie user base and their database. The leap in the amount of customers makes it possible for Tikkie to become THE payment method in the retail industry. The managing director of Tikkie, Freek de Steenwinkel, believes that volume is the most important objective to become the number one player in the retail market with their mobile payment system.
Looking at the speed and convenience of the app, more and more companies have added Tikkie as one of the possible payment options. The companies see the advantages of the app. They receive their payments in time, have an option to personalize their pages and they can easily look online at their payment overview. This ease of the use of Tikkie increases the ties with the companies with their users, but likewise Tikkie improves their customer relationships by delivering an app that gives a lot of ease on financial controlling. Tikkie stands at the beginning of a huge upcoming success. I believe that in less than a year Tikkie will be expanding to multiple other countries, so everyone can enjoy the ease of Tikkie.
Hi Kristel!
Thank you for your interesting blog. I am a Tikkie user myself and I really like the ease-of-use.
I was interested in the business model of Tikkie, as it is a free service, and I did some research.
Because Tikkie is free to use, it does not generate direct revenue for ABN AMRO. However, ABN AMRO has costs associated with the app: they have 5 FTE working on the app, and they also have to pay a fee to IDeal for every transaction made on the app.
Most of Tikkie’s value is generated indirectly:
First of all, offering a free app that is easy-to-use for customers of every bank, has a positive effect on ABN AMRO’s reputation.
Second, Tikkie generates a lot of consumer data. As we all know, this data is valuable and can be used to improve ABN AMRO’s strategic decision-making, or it can be sold to other companies.
Finally, as you mentioned, Tikkie is expanding. In cooperation with companies, ABN AMRO can negotiate a percentage of sales, which will eventually generate direct revenue.