Published in Berlingske December 12, 2025
Companies are expected to be more ready, more agile and more technically well-prepared than the state itself.
Jesper Svarer Nissen is the founder of Grade A Copenhagen.
Recently, the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority decided that banks in Denmark had been illegally issuing Visa/Dankort cards to businesses for years. The reason?
These combination cards (Visa/Dankort business) cannot be electronically identified as company cards, which they must be, among other things, so that fees and rules can be enforced correctly.
Fair enough in theory. Rules are rules.
But it led to one very concrete consequence:
- The largest banks in Denmark were ordered to change their practices.
- Therefore, business Visa/Dankort is now being phased out.
- And businesses are being pushed onto Mastercard Business instead.
So far, that may sound reasonable. But here comes the absurd:
Several of the government's own systems cannot accept Mastercard yet. This means that companies are currently facing situations like these: You cannot pay certain court fees or public charges with your new company card. You may experience problems paying taxes via the authorities' own platforms. And furthermore, you may experience that Mastercard does not work for Meta Ads - in the middle of the high season.
So what do traders do? They do the most paradoxical thing:
They use their personal Visa cards to pay for business expenses.
They are making outlays.
They book extra.
They spend more time on administration than on operations.
All because the authorities have created rules, banks are trying to implement them - but the infrastructure is so far behind that companies have to find creative solutions to even function.
It's like being told that everyone now has to drive an electric car...But the charging stations will be here in 18 months.
And until then, we have to “make do”.
As a small business, this means in concrete terms:
If our company card doesn't work for Meta, we have to use private Visa.
This results in extra accounting, expenses and unnecessary complexity.
For a startup or SME, it's not just an annoyance.
This is lost time, lost focus and real operational disruptions.
If you want to modernize payment systems in Denmark, the absolute first step should be:
- That the authorities' own systems work with the cards that companies are forced to use.
- That banks and authorities implement simultaneously – not at their own pace.
- That companies do not end up using private finances as a stopgap solution for public IT rationalization.
The rules themselves are not the problem. The problem is that you introduce them before you have the infrastructure. And so here we are:
Companies are expected to be more ready, more agile and more technically well-prepared than the state itself.
We can simply do better in Denmark.
