After two years of painstaking prepartion, more than a dozen banks connected to Swedish mobile payments system Swish are set to test the pan-Nordic payments platform P27 by the end of the year.
Backed by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB and Swedbank, P27's lofty ambition is to create one common state of the art payment platform in the Nordic countries.
P27 customer relation director Jacob Groth says it is currently onboarding and testing with real customers in Sweden, two years on from the 2020 takeover of of Bankgirot, Sweden’s only clearing house for mass payments.
The current timeline calls for SEK instant preparations to be finalised during the second half of 2022, followed by SEK batch preparations to be finalised in early 2023.
While Swedish banks may be the first to join P27’s platform, their Danish counterparts aren’t far behind. Like in Sweden, a transformation committee has already been set up in Denmark to facilitate the transition towards P27.
The Danish central bank’s move to include the Danish krona in the European Central Bank’s real-time settlement system TIPS, followed by a sector decision to move to P27, was another important milestone for P27.
One common clearing system in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, as well as instant settlement in TIPS, will harmonise the way payments are made across the Nordics, says Groth.
“Even if the journey is now a bit longer than we first anticipated, it’s still a very nice fit,” he says. “We now have central banks in the region moving in the same direction. That type of alignment will make it easier for us to leverage our vision of an integrated Nordic payments region.”