Building the future of payments, together: inside Verifone's Partner Hackathons in the Nordics

What happens when you put a room full of developers - from software companies, integration partners, and Verifone engineering teams - together for a full day, hand them test hardware, and say: let's build?

That's exactly what we did this March, kicking off our quarterly series of Partner Hackathons across four Nordic cities: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo. And the answer, it turns out, is a lot.

More than a tech event

While a hackathon might sound like something reserved for Silicon Valley, what we set out to do with our Nordic partner series is something more grounded, and more valuable.

These aren't pitch competitions or innovation theaters. They're focused, working sessions where software developers, value-added resellers and other development partners spend a full day tackling real integration challenges, side by side with the Verifone engineers who built the systems they're integrating with.

There is no formality, nor hierarchy in these sessions. Verifone engineers and partner developers meet as peers, share what they're working on, and get started. Participants are given access to the Verifone development environment and test terminals on the spot. Then the day proceeds with everyone doing what they know best: code editors open, questions fly, and problems get solved.

By the end of the day, most participants leave with working code.

The problems that only get solved in a room

Payments integration is genuinely complex. The number of APIs, SDKs, device configurations, and processor setups that partners need to navigate has grown significantly.

There's a particular kind of problem that gets solved in person that simply doesn't translate the same over email or a support ticket. When a developer is stuck on a configuration question that would take days to resolve asynchronously, a Verifone engineer in the same room can diagnose it in minutes. When a partner is approaching an integration in a way that won't scale, a quick conversation can redirect months of effort.

That's the real value of these sessions: beyond access to hardware, access to the people behind it is key.

"We see tremendous value in having Verifone engineers work alongside the engineers from our ISV partners," says Lars Marlow Krosby, Verifone VP of Engineering in the Nordics and the leader of this month's series. "We see that our partners experience great progress in just a few hours when they get in the room with our subject matter experts."

That proximity benefits both sides. Watching how partners actually use our technology, what they reach for first, where they get stuck, what workarounds they've invented, provides direct input into our product development. Integration challenges spotted in a hackathon become features on a roadmap.

What partners actually built

The recent hackathon sessions produced tangible results across all four cities, and the range of integrations completed in a single day speaks for itself.

• One software company built a fully functional point-of-sale application, loaded it directly onto a Verifone Android terminal, and completed an on-device PSDK integration, all before the day was out.
• Another partner used the session to migrate away from a legacy integration, replacing it with a modern PSDK off-device setup against a Verifone Android device. The kind of migration that typically sits on a backlog for months was cleared in a single focused day.
• A third development partner ran a complete on-device PSDK integration and had their POS application running on the new Verifone Victa Portable before the session wrapped up.

These weren't prototypes or proof-of-concepts. They were real integrations, in production-ready form, completed by developers who walked in with a challenge and walked out with a solution.

The power of the right people  

One detail from the March sessions captures something important about how these hackathons work. During the day, an unexpected connectivity issue, the kind of edge-case problem that can sit unresolved for weeks in a normal support cycle. Within the session, the right people were in the room to diagnose it, escalate it, and set it on a path to resolution before the day was out.

That's not a story about a hackathon going wrong. That's a story about what becomes possible when you remove the distance between the people experiencing a problem and the people who can fix it.

The Verifone team present across the Nordic sessions included specialists in the new developer portal, SoftPOS, and PSDK SDI; payment application experts guiding on payment flows and API usage; and partner integration specialists reviewing configurations and recommending the right architecture. When a question was outside the room's expertise, the team brought in the right person remotely. On the spot.

What the format makes possible

The Verifone Partner Hackathon sessions are deliberately kept small. Each city hosts a focused group, keeping the environment intimate enough for real collaboration. Stockholm had strong energy and active cross-partner conversations. Copenhagen's smaller group created space for deep technical discussions. Helsinki was heads-down and highly productive. Oslo, the final session of the week, had a packed room and the kind of momentum that comes from a team that's been refining the format all week.

Each session also gave participants their first hands-on experience with Verifone's new developer portal, a platform designed to make access and onboarding dramatically faster. In the old portal, getting access to software and documentation could take weeks. With the new portal, enrollment and access were completed in minutes during the sessions. The contrast wasn't subtle, and the feedback from participants reflected it.

One attending partner, Tomas Gärde, Gardeco CEO, commented: “Extremely impressed by Verifone’s line-up; they dedicated all their resources to our disposal. As a result, we were able to solve problems together that hadn’t been possible to solve before.”

A different kind of partnership

There's a philosophy behind this kind of investment. Verifone works with more than 2,500 partners globally. The relationships that perform best, creating value for partners, for merchants, and for the payments ecosystem, are the ones built on genuine collaboration, not just contractual alignment.

Running hackathons across four cities in a single week isn't a small undertaking. It takes engineering time, logistics, devices, and a regional team willing to spend a week on the road. Verifone does it because we believe that showing up in person, solving problems together, and treating partner developers as peers rather than end-users of documentation is what real partnership looks like.

All participants who completed the day received a certificate of participation, a small recognition of something genuinely worth recognizing: they came in, they built something, and they left with it working.

Join the next session

The Partner Hackathon series in the Nordics will run quarterly in 2026, with sessions planned across Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo in June, September, and November.

The format is intentionally accessible. You don't need to arrive with a polished plan. You need a laptop, your source code, your development environment, and a real integration challenge you've been wanting to tackle. Verifone provides the hardware, the expertise, and the time.

If you're a software developer or integration partner working with Verifone in the Nordics, this is your room.

Interested Verifone partners can submit their request to join an upcoming hackathon session in the Nordics here.

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