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The Swedish financial regulator, the Finansinspektionen, is investigating the clearing system’s IT and information security operations.
The purpose of the investigation, according to the regulator, is to assess how the company complies with rules for how incidents in IT and information security should be handled.
The intervention comes hot off the heels of the news earlier this week that Klarna and Loomis are being investigated by the supervisor over their money laundering systems.
“An interruption in Bankgirocentralen BGC's critical operations risks giving rise to serious disruptions in the Swedish payment system, which in turn risks spreading to the rest of the financial system,” the Finansinspektionen said in a statement.
Against this background, it is important that the clearing system has good governance and the ability to identify, protect, and detect risks and threats in terms of IT and information security, the regulator said.
Bankgirot was established by Sweden’s banks in the 1950s, and last year it was responsible for processing 7.8m payments, as well as performing 1.7m real-time payments.
And in October 2020, Bankgirot began the process of being acquired by P27, the joint initiative that is set on establishing a pan-Nordic payments infrastructure.
This is not the first time recently that Bankgirot has faced scrutiny from Sweden’s financial regulator, having started a currently ongoing investigation in August 2021.
This was due to the fact that the clearing system had outsourced its IT operations, which the regulator wanted to scrutinise, checking that it had established and implemented appropriate management of selected parts of its outsourced operations.
At the time, the regulator’s Maximilian Görtz said: “The payment system affects everything and everyone in our society and even short outages can have very large negative effects. Good governance and internal control are therefore a key component for conducting a professional activity where society's trust is maintained.”
Although the Finansinspektionen’s latest investigation also focuses on IT operations, the one that opened last year has yet to close.
Investigations opened at a similar time, including one into security incidents at Klarna, were completed earlier this year.
