Groceries, banking and meds: how ICA turned scale into an everyday ecosystem

by Mari Katajamäki | October 9, 2025

In the Nordics’ tight grocery market, growth now comes from owning the customer’s daily needs, not just the shopping basket. At Professio’s Chief of Finance 2024, Nina Jönsson, CEO of ICA Gruppen, set out how a grocery core extends into pharmacy, banking, insurance and real estate, and how data and AI stitch the whole together.

One customer, many services

ICA’s model piggybacks on footfall. Pharmacies are co-located with food stores and keep the same opening hours — a convenience shift that helped ICA to market leadership in Sweden’s deregulated pharmacy market. The group also runs a bank born from a 1990s loyalty card and a simple insurance business. The logic is scale and cross-sell: ≈5.4 million loyalty customers in Sweden and ≈1.7 million daily store visits feed every adjacent service.

Jönsson framed it bluntly: use the strength of the grocery customer base to offer services that support the core. During the inflation spike, ICA tied mortgage pricing to loyalty activity — “the more food you buy, the better interest rate you get on your mortgage” — and briefly captured double-digit share of new home loans.

Data, AI and execution discipline

Customer consent for group-wide data use is the flywheel. On top of that sits a growing AI layer: store-specific pricing and planograms, assortment planning, personalized communications, and warehouse automation. Jönsson’s caveat was operational: every AI initiative must have a defined effect, or the organization will chase “nice-to-haves” across dozens of pilots.

Leadership, CFOs and communication

Jönsson argued that business understanding is the defining skill for CFOs. Finance leaders should learn the business quickly, help solve operational problems and communicate results in plain language. She illustrated the CEO–CFO proximity she expects with a practical detail: desks opposite each other in an open office to enable daily five-minute decisions. Disagreement is welcomed — provided it surfaces early and clearly.

Responsibility, local sourcing — and two demand shocks

Scope-3 emissions sit largely in what customers buy, so ICA pushes healthier, lower-impact choices and raises the share of Swedish-made products to bolster resilience. Looking ahead, Jönsson highlighted two consumer shifts retailers must reconcile:

Gen Z’s values–behavior gap — sustainability talk vs. fast-fashion and convenience purchases — which demands data-led segmentation rather than slogans.