District Marketplace Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025 - Winner

For decades, Danske Bank underinvested in digital offerings for the SMB segment. Compared to large corporates and institutional clients, SMBs were seen as less attractive, offering lower revenue per customer and requiring higher maintenance. As a result, IT resources were rarely prioritized for their needs.

Challenging this legacy, the digital banking department for business customers set out to radically improve the SMB experience. The ambition: to create a fully-fledged self-service storefront that would empower SMBs with the same level of advisory and access as our largest clients, possibly even surpassing it through data and design.

Our foundation was District, Danske Bank’s existing digital banking platform, which serves over half a million business customers across Northern Europe. The idea was to build a symbiotic experience between daily banking tasks and product exploration, enabling customers to discover, evaluate, and order relevant financial services seamlessly inside their bank.

With District Marketplace, we set out to create an embedded, contextual, and intuitive interface where customers could find solutions for their “jobs to be done.” Unlike competitors that focused on isolated digital product flows, we envisioned a fully integrated, multi-product marketplace with a wide portfolio and a unified order experience. While FinTech’s offer competitive niche solutions, they lack the coverage, credibility, and security that a full-service bank can offer at scale.

We drew inspiration from platforms like Apple’s App Store, Unity’s Asset Store, and Shopify’s B2B plugin ecosystem all grounded in platform thinking and customer-centric design.

Today, District Marketplace is live in five countries with over 100 financial products and services available. It has facilitated more than 10,000 digital orders, and within just two years, nearly 50% of orders for supported products have shifted from traditional channels to this digital solution primarily through organic adoption. Notably, even medium and large business customers have shown strong enthusiasm for the platform.

While SMB customers embraced the platform quickly, internal adoption required patience and persistent change leadership. As with any transformation, we met initial resistance, but through inclusion, transparency, and ongoing dialogue, we’ve built strong internal trust. Today, our employees confidently refer customers to the platform, trusting that it can deliver an equal if not better experience.

District Marketplace is the result of four years of cross-functional collaboration, powered by close partnerships between product, compliance, commercial teams and a strong delivery alliance with Infosys, which forms the core of our development capacity.