In June 2021, the news of Ingka acquiring 49% of the shares in Ikano Bank was published. Our CEO Henrik Eklund and Mikael Palmquist, Deputy Retail Operations Manager at Ingka celebrated the deal by assembling IKEA furniture and talking about the opportunities the deepened partnership will give. Together, we will continue the journey to make financial services accessible and affordable for the many people. And during five weeks in October and November, we celebrated together with fun challenges, knowledge sharing and prizes to win.

Reaching more of the many

Ingka operates 392 IKEA stores in 32 countries and for them the partnership is an important step on the journey to offer accessible and affordable financial services, as part of the future customer eco-system. And for the Bank it is a great opportunity to accelerate the digital transformation and develop new seamless banking services together with IKEA. One of the people working every day with our new solutions is Release Train Engineer Jess Fraser-Darling. She looks forward to the benefits of the partnership with IKEA in her daily work:

“We always want to reach more of the many, and with access to IKEA’s broad customer base we can listen to what they need and adapt to that. With our new agile development, we can be more reactive and responsive to the people using our services.”

Five weeks of celebration

To engage both Ikano Bank and IKEA co-workers in our markets in the good news, Celebration Weeks was held in October and November together with IKEA. Every week a new challenge was launched, with themes such as “Make your wallet happy”, “Think outside the flat pack” and “Send a postcard from the future”. The contributions were many and full of good ideas, the best ones awarded with IKEA gift cards and breakfast or lunch for the team at the local IKEA store.