SAS has launched the EuroBonus Executive Business Card, its first business credit card for small and medium-sized enterprises across Scandinavia. SAS is the Scandinavian airline group, marking its 80th anniversary this year, with EuroBonus as its long-running loyalty programme.
The card combines a credit line with EuroBonus loyalty benefits, travel perks, and an app with expense and receipt management integrated into ERP systems. The programme is operated by SAS under the EuroBonus umbrella, with the Swedish credit institution Nordiska providing the Cards-as-a-Service infrastructure for issuance and credit, and the Danish fintech Cardlay providing the app and expense management. The rollout will take place in phases across Scandinavia, starting with the Executive Business Card.
Is this a co-branded card or something else?
An airline launches a new card, so I guess we all assume it's a co-branded card. Especially when the language in the press release says the same. But is it actually a standard co-brand or something else? Spoiler, it has features of a co-branded card but is also different.
Let's look at the spectrum. At one end sit the traditional bank-led co-brands, where the bank wins a tender, issues the card, and owns the product roadmap. Lufthansa Miles & More and SAS's previous EuroBonus cards with SEB and Diners are exactly that (Lufthansa Miles & More recently switched its German portfolio from DKB to Deutsche Bank in October 2025). At the other end sit the fully embedded cards we see in vertical SaaS, where the platform owns the customer relationship and the card is one feature inside a much wider product. But there is a second variant of co-branded cards , where the partner is a BaaS fintech rather than a traditional bank. ADAC, the German automobile club, switched its 1.3 million-card portfolio from Landesbank Berlin to Solaris in 2023. Still a co-brand, but a regulated fintech now sits where a traditional bank used to.
And that brings us to where SAS sits. Together with the Porsche Card (EFR) on Nordiska and Enfuce, SAS is at the most recent end of the spectrum. The brand operates the programme directly. The regulated entity sits in the background. The in-app product layer is more developed, with expense management, receipt capture, and ERP synchronisation. So is this embedded finance? Not quite. The in-app experience is still heavily financial, and the loyalty benefits like EuroBonus points, lounge access, and travel insurance are perks attached to the card rather than features inside the app. But it is also not a traditional co-brand. The honest answer is that it sits somewhere in between, and the category itself is still forming.
Nordiska's second non-FS card programme in a year
So who is Nordiska? Probably not a name many readers know, even if you have been in European fintech for a while. Nordiska is a Swedish licensed credit institution, founded in 2014, with its banking licence approved in December 2024 in one of Sweden's fastest approvals. It has been expanding across Sweden, Finland, and Germany through embedded finance partnerships, running on a Mambu-powered core. As mentioned above, Nordiska also powers the new Porsche Card setup, although there it works alongside Enfuce as the issuer. The SAS setup is simpler, with Nordiska covering both issuance and credit and no separate issuer in the stack. Two big non-financial enterprises both moving away from a traditional bank co-brand, both landing on Nordiska, both within around a year. Nordiska is positioning itself as the European Cards-as-a-Service partner for non-financial brands that want to operate something like a co-brand but would like to take more control of the offering.
