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Uploaded byChristian Løverås
How Slack Powers Vipps MobilePay: Culture, Speed & Automation at Scale
From the Salesforce World Tour, Copenhagen, August 2024. How does a 600-person Nordic fintech operate across three countries — with almost no email and very few meetings? By using Slack as its cultural and operational backbone. In this presentation from the Slack World Tour, Christian Løverås shows how Vipps MobilePay uses Slack to work faster, collaborate across borders, support partners, handle incidents, and build a unified company culture. Key topics covered: • A unified cross-Nordic culture built after the Vipps–MobilePay merger • Slack as the default communication platform • All internal communication • 1200+ external partner channels • No internal email • Few recurring meetings • Automation everywhere • Incident reporting for financial authorities (pages 17–20) • API Error Bot notifying partners about integration mistakes (page 39) • Custom Slackbot responses and workflows (page 27) • AI embedded in daily teamwork • Vippsi: custom AI assistant using GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision (page 41) • Automatic translation across Norwegian, Danish, Finnish & English • AI-powered search in developer support channels (page 44–45) • Open culture and transparency • All channels open to everyone (page 35–36) • Company-wide info in #vipps-mobilepay (page 23) • Fun channels like #dadjokes and #team-risk-compliance-memes (pages 24–26) • How teams collaborate with customers • Daily creation of Slack Connect channels (page 31) • Partners get direct access to product managers and developers • Fast resolution through shared channels The result: A fast, open, low-friction way of working — across Denmark, Norway, and Finland — where teams move quickly, collaborate openly, and use automation and AI to remove busywork.
How Slack Powers Vipps MobilePay: Culture, Speed & Automation at Scale
- 1. Slack in VippsMobilePay How it helps us work faster and build our culture
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- 4. Wildly difficult tonavigate through. The old app was easier and more transparent. But it's typical to change something that works just because you're bored.
- 5. 600 employees in Denmark,Norway and Finland
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- 9. How do we useSlack?
- 10. We use Slackfor everything Embedded AI Conversations Automation
- 11. We use Slackfor everything Conversations Embedded AI Automation External communication with partners and merchants • 1200+ external channels • Very few “status meetings” • Very few recurring meetings All internal communication • No email • Few meetings
- 12. We use Slackfor everything Automation Embedded AI Conversations Incident management • Automatic summaries of problems • Automatic reports for the financial authorities A bot that notifies external developers about their API errors Automatic Slackbot responses Code quality and errors for internal developers
- 13. We use Slackfor everything Embedded AI Conversations Automation Automatic translation from Norwegian, Danish and Finnish to English AI-based search in #platform-support for all developers Vippsi: A bot that uses ChatGPT for several tasks
- 14. Everyone uses Slack Platformsupport • All internal help for developers • All our development systems and tools Risk and Compliance • KYC, AML, etc • Product teams ask: “Is this OK to do?” Product teams teams • Strategy and plans • Help for internal people • Participate in customer’s channels Customer service • Notify product teams about problems • Get info from product teams • Details about incidents People and Operations • HR questions (most questions can be answered publicly) • Announcements (bonus, etc) Sales teams • Partners and large customers • Internal channels for planning, events, etc
- 15. Slack makes us more efficient Mostinternal meetings replaced by Slack discussions • We do still meet • We don’t have to “book time” to talk No internal email • Some of us only check email a few times a week Continuous contact with external users in dedicated Slack channels • 1200+ external channels for partners and customers Automations and integrations • Outlook integration (busy, vacation, etc) • ChatGPT (translations, tone of voice, etc) • Automatic responses • Salesforce integration (search)
- 16. It doesn’t matter wherewe are Slack flattens the hierarchy • Nobody cares about the org chart (in daily work) • There’s no “line of command” in Slack • We’re all the same on Slack Everyone is on Slack: • Office (the next desk or the next building) • Home office • Summer house • On the go
- 17. Incident handling andlegally required reporting to the financial authorities Create incident report, start logging all messages on a new page in Confluence Eyes emoji means “we’re on it!”
- 18. Example report thatwe are legally required to provide for the financial authorities: Automatically generated in Confluence, with link to the corresponding Jira issue.
- 19. All Slack messages relatedto this incident are automatically logged Images too
- 20. This saves usa lot of time We focus on fixing the problem, not logging Problem solving is a team effort The reports are automatically created (and they are very detailed) The incident bot notifies us if we need to update status pages, social media, etc
- 21. Helping partners Participants (numberof people): • Partner (3) • Partner manager (1) • Product manager (1) • Developers (5)
- 22. 77 messages later: Everyone’shappy Participants (number of people): • Partner (3) • Partner manager (1) • Product manager (1) • Developers (5)
- 23. We have usefuland serious channels #vipps-mobilepay: Company-wide information and announcements #help-people-and-org: Get help from HR and others #vm-sales: The main channel for sales .. stuff #help-slack: Get help with Slack
- 24. And we havesome other channels #dadjokes #oslo-cake #social-ski
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- 28. What about MicrosoftTeams? We use Microsoft Teams for video meetings We also use Cisco WebEx sometimes (we have a lot of Cisco screens) We use Microsoft Outlook, and it’s easy to use Teams for video meetings If the video meeting has a Q&A part, the questions are posted in Slack We post meeting conclusions, action points, etc. in Slack We work together in Slack We combine video in Teams with chat in Slack We don’t use the chat in Teams We post video recordings of the Teams meetings on Slack
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- 30. Channels for everyone Partners #partner-companyname_ext KeyAccounts #kam-companyname_ext Temporary channels #tmp-currency
- 31. We create channels almostevery day
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- 33. Example: “Sales people” createchannels Very fast communication • Direct communication with the right people • No meetings, calls or emails Add relevant internal people • Product manager(s), developers, UX, etc Invite the external people • Slack Connect or “single-channel guests” Lots of people may be in a channel • Often more of us than them • Only a few actively participate
- 34. Send emails withlots of people on CC “just to be sure” Everything happens in the channel Need help from an expert? Simply @mention that person, or that Slack user group (@team-epayments-engineers) Anyone can join Open discussions We don’t “Can we have a meeting about X?” Forward emails or long email conversations (we copy them into Slack) We don’t: • Just start the conversation in the channel • We do have meetings, but Slack eliminates most of them
- 35. All channels are available foreveryone
- 36. In a channelwith 200+ users:
- 37. Salesforce integration Type “/salesforcesomething” anywhere in Slack to search for it in Salesforce Here’s the result for “/salesforce dsb”:
- 38. Sales Elevate We alreadyuse Salesforce and Slack Had a nice demo in late 2023 Will look into this ASAP (“done” with the merger) We also want to be supercharged!
- 39. API Error Bot Scanslog for incorrect API use Notifies the external API partner/merchant Also mentioned our partner manager Detects external developers’ API errors
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- 41. Vippsi: Our customAI app in Slack GPT 4 GPT 4 vision (to process images) Uses OpenAI functionality in Microsoft Azure
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- 44. AI help with #platform-support Everyonecan ask Vippsi to find information previously asked in #platform-support 200 developers can learn from each other’s questions We index all messages in #platform-support • Create summaries • Store it in a vector database • Make it searchable
- 47. Highlights Everything is open •No email, few meetings We get work done with Slack • One team, one culture Automations and integrations saves time • We are working on more.. External communication is very efficient • Team effort everywhere We can do even more with more integrations, apps, Sales Elevate and AI
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Editor's Notes
- #2 Merged in November 2022.
- #3 The same app in all markets, with different colours.
- #5 Everyone loves us! (Seriously: It has improved a lot since the first “new” MobilePay app)
- #6 We are more people in Vipps MobilePay than some people think. “Isn’t the app done?”
- #8 Derfor har vi satt oss en ganske så ambisiøs ambisjon nemlig å «become the worlds most loved wallet, replacing hassle with dazzle for all». Det betyr at vi ønsker å fortsette å være de best likte merkevarene og vi skal fortsette å forenkle og fjerne hverdagsknot og erstatte det med løsninger som begeistrer. Og vi skal vokse. For å komme dit jobber vi nå med å merge de to løsningene over på en teknisk plattform. Det er en stor jobb som nå gjøres. I tillegg som alle vet så er det krevende å skulle slå sammen to kulturer.
- #9 Så for å oppsummere hva vi har lært så langt i denne fusjonen: Åpenhet er helt nødvendig for å sikre tillitt – og slack er en god måte å fasilitere åpenhet på. Så lenge man ikke drukner folk i informasjon Dialog er en helt nødvendig del av åpenhet Når man merger to kulturer skal man gi ganske mye rom for både fuckups og læring Ta vare på det beste fra kulturene som merges Memes er både gøy og nyttig
- #26 The meme channel is a everything-goes humour-based stream of comments to everything that goes on in the company. In the merger: A culture shock for some to see that even serious town hall meetings had a live stream of jokes.
- #27 We want to learn from all our mistakes, and we share our fuckups. Everyone can make mistakes, and we talk about them so we can avoid making the same mistake twice.
- #28 Everyone can make automatic responses. We recommend the “!” prefix, to avoid getting “help” all the time.
- #29 Teams is great, but it’s not Slack.