Norwegian (Oslo Gardermoen) is being sued by a bank it once owned over whether it has the right to use the word Norwegian in its brand name, while the bank is the two sides’ ongoing card cooperation.

Norwegian once owned Bank Norwegian, a financial offshoot established in 2007, but in August 2019 as it encountered snowballing economic travails, it sold its entire 17.5% stake in Norwegian Finans Holding (NOFI), the entity that owned it, for a total sum of NOK2.22 billion kroner (USD245 million at the time).

The buyer was Cidron Xingu Limited, a company indirectly controlled by the Finnish financial group Sampo and Nordic Capital Fund IX, run by the private equity firm Nordic Capital. A brand licensing agreement was put in place as part of the deal, which was completed in October 2019.

However, Swedish niche bank Nordax Group acquired Bank Norwegian two years later. Now, it wants to institute a name change to either “Bank Norwegian, a part of Nordax Bank AB” or “Bank Norwegian, a branch of Nordax Bank AB”. The latter descriptor is already used on its credit cards, its website shows.

The bank and its parent say this is required under Norwegian law to clarify who the owners are, but the airline Norwegian, which owns the rights to the Norwegian brand, objects to it being associated with another brand, namely Nordax. Norwegian law requires banks to clearly state who owns the business.

Bank Norwegian has now sued the airline to obtain a legal clarification, Nordax Bank’s report for the first quarter of 2023, disclosed last week, reveals.

“We own the right to use the company name Bank Norwegian, and we believe that we have the same right to market our name,” Merete Gillund, the bank’s head of new markets, told the online business daily E24 Næringsliv.

The carrier is disputing the bank’s right to fulfil its statutory duty to disclose the relationship with Nordax and disputes the bank’s ownership of the Bank Norwegian trademark, she claimed, adding: “The airline also believes it has the right to license the trademark Bank Norwegian to other banks. After a long period of dialogue, we see no other solution than to get a legal clarification of the disagreement.”

Bank Norwegian is an online and mobile-based consumer loan bank that offers credit cards, loans, deposits, and insurance products to private customers, with around 1.55 million customers in the Nordic region, according to Nordax’s quarterly report.

Norwegian disagrees with the lawsuit, as its communications director Esben Tuman told E24. “We are surprised by the subpoena and believe this is something we could have solved in a friendly way, outside the legal system. In short, we disagree that the Swedish bank Nordax can use our brand as they have done since the acquisition, and we have asked them to change this,” he said.

He added that the mixing of the Nordax and Bank Norwegian brands is not in line with the agreement on how the airline's brand name - for which the bank pays the airline - can be used.

Bank Norwegian has meanwhile threatened to withdraw its co-branded airline credit card product and said that a review of the product is taking place. As the Nordax report put it: “Given the initiated legal process and the planned graphic redesign [by Bank Norwegian], the bank plans to initiate a strategic review of the cooperation with the Norwegian Air Shuttle group in terms of the credit cards.”