20 April 2022

FinTech and trade unions

Social dialogue and collective organization in Danish banking is strong with a general agreement coverage of 80 percent and high membership rates of unions and employers´ associations. In this report, we examine how social dialogue unfolds among Fintech companies, which represents a new area of the sector in Denmark, through in-depth case studies.

In 2021, three of the largest Fintechs in Denmark formed an employers´ association for Danish Fintech companies (AF) as well as initiated and negotiated a framework agreement on different labour standards with Finansforbundet. One of the members of AF, Lunar Bank, who participated in the negotiations, explain that the internal and the external legitimacy on the market played a key role for taking this step. However, the agreement was also necessary to facilitate a clear structure on wages and working conditions and clear rules of the game within the organization, as individual bargaining tend to be time consuming and complex in a large organization. The union, Finansforbundet, sees the framework agreement as a lever to start covering the new Fintech industry with collective agreements, as this submarket is part of the Danish labour market that until this agreement often operated on the outskirt of the Danish collective bargaining model. In many ways, the agreement can be seen as a result of the institution building via Copenhagen Fintech Lab, which has received strong support from Finansforbundet. However, it is also intended to be the first step on the way to organize workers in the future. As the framework agreement is very new, this study has been unable to evaluate the effects of the agreement and its implementation and further implications. Future studies should unfold the impact of the framework agreement for social dialogue at company level.

Read the full danish report 'The digital transformation of financial services markets and industrial relations' by Anna Ilsøe and Trine P. Larsen.