.svg)
Thirteen Swedish banks are planning to start testing the Nordic payments platform before the end of the year using the Swedish instant payments solution Swish.
The testing represents a significant milestone for the P27 initiative as the project moves from working with prospective participants to actual customers.
Swish, the mobile payment service used by more than 90 percent of the Swedish population, will be used to test the new infrastructure.
SEK instant preparations are scheduled to be finalised during the second half of 2022, which will be followed by SEK batch preparations planned to be completed by early 2023.
Following the migration from the current batch scheme in SEK, both the SEK instant and the DKK and EUR schemes are in the pipeline, P27 Nordic Payments CEO Paula da Silva said.
“The level of activity is lively. Banks are in preparation mode, ERP [enterprise resource planning] vendors are adapting their formats, and the Transformation Committees in most countries are intensifying their meeting schedules,” she added.
“In P27 operational readiness is on top of the agenda.”
Following the Swedish banks, Danish institutions will also join the testing.
“While Swedish banks may be the first to join P27’s platform, their Danish counterparts aren’t far behind,” P27 Nordic Payments said in a release.
A transformation committee has now been set up in Denmark to facilitate the transition to P27. This followed a decision by Denmark’s banking association, Finance Denmark, in early January to replace Finance Denmark with P27 Nordic Payments as the country’s national clearing house.
P27 started in 2017 as a joint Nordic bank project to improve payments for the 27m inhabitants in the Nordics. However, in 2019, Norwegian banks pulled out of the initiative, leaving banks in Sweden, Denmark and Finland to continue their work on the project.
Also in 2019, Mastercard was chosen to build and manage the underlying infrastructure for the new platform.
“Even if the journey is now a bit longer than we first anticipated, it’s still a very nice fit,” said customer relations director Jacob Groth.
“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,” he added.
The goal of P27 is to create a common clearing system in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, as well as instant settlement in TIPS, which will help level the playing field between large and small banks in the region.
The platform will allow banks to start aligning their processes and how they manage their liquidity to an even greater degree.
“Rather than having multiple systems to support the same processes, you can now have one system supporting those processes across multiple currencies, which is a huge benefit,” said Groth.
Alongside this announcement, the Nordic Payments Council also released a white paper looking at recent trends in payments across the region and the road ahead for P27.
This includes topics such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), open banking, cross-border payments, the merger of Vipps, MobilePay, and Pivo and future payments initiatives.
