A regulatory intervention by the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority has blocked the launch of a new artificial intelligence assistant developed by accounting software provider Visma Dinero. The antitrust watchdog issued a formal tightening of competition rules against the company, determining that the tool’s advanced benchmarking capabilities risked facilitating widespread violations of competition law across multiple commercial sectors.
The controversy centers on a “virtual CFO” feature designed by Dinero to analyze a subscriber’s proprietary financial records and anonymously compare them against data harvested from the 99,000 other businesses utilizing the platform. The AI tool was engineered to evaluate specific metrics, such as a company’s hourly rates, contribution margins, marketing outlays, and rental costs, against regional and industry averages. By pairing this financial data with factors like capacity utilization and customer reputation, the assistant generated real-time, automated business strategies. Crucially, if a business fell below the statistical average, the AI would provide explicit directives, such as advising a user to consider raising their prices.
Antitrust authorities flagged the software after it was heavily marketed in May 2025. Promotional material and social media posts from Dinero’s leadership explicitly highlighted these functions, showcasing hypothetical scenarios where the AI would inform a local contractor that their rates were ten percent lower than the regional average and suggest a price hike.
The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority intervened immediately, conducting an on-site inspection at Dinero’s offices in June 2025, which prompted the software provider to deactivate the algorithmic benchmarking features before a full market rollout. Regulators warned that allowing competitors to access highly detailed insights into rival cost structures and price points in near real-time—even when filtered through regional averages—poses a severe threat to market health. Such digital systems tend to standardize pricing across industries, creating artificial cost norms and severely reducing the incentive for businesses to compete on price and service quality.
Under European and Danish competition frameworks, the legal responsibility for compliance rests entirely with individual businesses. Regulatory guidance confirms that using digital tools or trade metrics to benchmark prices and costs against direct market rivals is generally illegal if the data serves as an active guide for corporate pricing strategies. Because the exchange of competitively sensitive data—including prices, costs, customer lists, and production capacities—harms end consumers, the authority’s stricture ensures that the anti-competitive iterations of the software will remain permanently barred from the market.
