Danes are leaving their wallets at home as mobile-phone payments are infecting grocery stores, Starbucks Corp.'s coffee shops and even the illegal hash trade in Copenhagen’s Christiania district.

Almost a third of the populace began using Danske Banking A/S (DANSKE)'s MobilePay App given that May in 2013 as well as greater than 80,000 payments are refined every day. Consumers could utilize the app, which is open to anybody with a Danish charge card, to pay for goods at more than 3,400 stores nationwide.

For Denmark's biggest bank it's a way of both reducing payments as well as shielding its home turf as companies such Apple Inc. (AAPL) as well as Paypal Inc. target mobile repayment services.

'More than anything, new payment technologies assists Danish banks keep international competition away,' Christian Hede, a Copenhagen-based banking analyst at Nordea Bank AB (NDA), said in an interview. 'They're keeping Google, PayPal and also all the various other payment systems from using their revenue stream.'

Part of Danske's success is that it has offered its app free of charge, consuming some expenditures, and that it's open to non-customers. Other apps, such as Swipp, offered by Nordea, the biggest Nordic loan provider, as well as a group of smaller banks, Paym in the U.K., Softcard in the U.S., and also Sweden's Swish, are built on existing customers. Nordea is now opening its app to non-clients.

Danske imagines its application ultimately handling the entire banking  encounter.

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'Whether it's paying by credit card, cash, paying on the net or setting up automatic month-to-month payments eventually the app ought to be able to do it all,'  said Mark Wraa-Hansen, the executive accountable of creating Danske's MobilePay.

Dansk Supermarked, the country's biggest grocery retailer, is accepting cellphone repayments at its retailer. It's now preparing for the next step, when chips in phones or on wristbands will allow customers to purchase items with a swipe.

'Mobile innovation is changing how Danish consumers pay,'  said Joergen Kluewer, head of E-commerce at the supermarket chain, co-owned by A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S. (MAERSKB) 'Modern technology is well heading though still in the test-phase, but now we're on board and preparing for the future with Danske. Our terminals already have scanners for chip payments.'

Danske Bank is setting itself as much as manage tightening competition then smartphones into wallets. Apple is now embedding chips into its most recent mobile phone and partnering with Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and American Express Co.

The chip that Apple is embedding to take it to next step, the Near Industry Communication-chip, is already a hit in Denmark & Danske intends to incorporate it with its app by next year at the latest.

About 50,000 festival-goers used phones to load chip-wristbands to pay for beers, meals as well as band product at Smukfest in Skanderborg last month. Virtually fifty percent of all purchases were done by chips as sales took much less than 5 seconds to finish.

'Without money and credit cards we market beers much, much faster,' said Each Langpap, the festival's chief accountant, in an interview.