February 27, 2018 TnH Global

Neo-bank Lunar Way launches ‘Travel Card’ allowing Danish tourists to avoid overseas spending fees

As part of their commitment to provide consumers with innovative offerings and customer-centric banking experiences, neo-bank Lunar Way, in collaboration with Global Processing Services, announced the launch of the ‘Travel Card’ – marking yet another disruptive step for the challenger bank in the Danish market.

Since its initial launch in 2015, the Danish challenger bank, Lunar Way, has demonstrated an innovative, customer-focused approach aiming at building a full-service digital banking experience by offering several financial products within their mobile-only app. Lunar Way users have access to an account provided by local partner banks and can spend in total security using a Visa debit card.

The launch of the Travel Card will provide Lunar Way customers with access to payments in several currencies without the fees normally associated with foreign transactions. In order to avoid exchange rates, the cardholder can swap between several currencies and pay in the local one, directly in the app.

People will gain access to the Travel Card product when signing up to Lunar Way, where Travel Card is one out of several financial products which we offer from within the app.  In practice, when signing up for Lunar Way, the user gets a Danish bank account and is actually able to use Lunar Way as their primary banking service.

The Travel Card offers not only significant savings for the consumers, when withdrawing money and paying abroad, but also added service features, such as the ability to change PIN and freeze, activate or block the card directly from the app, offering a full flexibility and customer control.

Travel & Tourism is an important economic activity in most countries around the world and for the sixth successive year, growth in Travel & Tourism outpaced that of the global economy (2.5%), according to World Tourism Council’s Travel and Tourism Economic Impact Report 2017. Particularly, in Denmark, expenditure on outbound travel continued to show steady growth from 2016 to 2017. Additionally, domestic travel spending generated 56.2% of direct Travel & Tourism GDP in 2016 and is expected to grow by a further 1.0% in 2017 to DKK 63.5bn, and rise by 2.0% pa to DKK 77.2bn in 2027.

The report states that in 2016, Denmark’s expenditure on outbound travel reached DKK 58.9bn and grew to DKK 59.2bn in 2017, with estimated forecast to reach DKK 80.9bn in 2027. With such growth, the Travel Card is a much awaited and needed product by Danish consumers, and a wider international launch of the card is planned for the near future.

Suresh Vaghjiani, Managing Director at GPS comments, “Lunar Way are demonstrating a great example of how the GPS Multi-FX wallet can enable companies to provide their customers with user-friendly multi-currency solutions. We are thrilled to see how our GPS Apex platform helps organisations like Lunar Way to disrupt the traditional payments landscape with products that make a real difference in consumers’ everyday life.”

Ken Villum Klausen, CEO at Lunar Way, comments,“With the launch of Travel Card we’re enabling our users to spend freely abroad without paying fees, not only when they’re out traveling, but also when they’re shopping online in foreign web shops. The product has been much sought after in the Danish financial landscape, because of the current intransparent offers, which has shown to be complex for the average consumer to navigate. He further adds, “Thanks to GPS and their Multi-FX wallet technology, we’ve been able to develop an innovative financial product for the Danish market, which has been much needed.”