Conditioned on regulatory approvals, including merger approval by the European Commission and ownership assessment by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, P27 expects to close the acquisition in Q1 2021, a landmark step in plans to create a single clearing and settlement platform across the Nordic region.

Bankgirot, which manages transactions of a total value of approximately SEK 73 billion per day, also launched mobile payment system Swish in cooperation with the Central Bank of Sweden in 2012, which broke records and made over one million Swish payments in a single day on 25 September 2020.

Lars Sjögren, CEO of P27 Nordic Payments Platform, confirms that there will be no changes to Bankgirot services in the short term as the "stability of the Swedish payment system remains the main priority."

He adds that with Bankgirot, P27 will be able to "take the lead in building the world’s first integrated cross-border and cross-currency payments region, facilitating the needs of banks, consumers and society at large."

Backed by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB and Swedbank, P27 has been set the task of connecting 27 million people and with Bankgirot - the 60-year-old player which handles more than six million transactions a day - operational stability would be strengthened and would also bring in valuable knowledge of complex payments and compliance issues.

Magnus Sternbrink, Chair of the Board of Bankgirot comments: “We are happy that we could reach this signing today. P27 and Bankgirot would together be able to uphold stability in the current payment infrastructure, as well as create synergies and efficiency in the contemplated transformation to the new Nordic system platform.

In conversation earlier this year, Sjögren assured Finextra Research that project P27 was very much on track despite Covid-19. “We saw some impact on some activities but largely we are sticking to the plans that we had pre-Corona. [The industry] can expect to see a lot of P27 in the second half of 2020,” Sjogren said.

The lates news on the progress of P27 will be discussed in depth at EBAday 2020. For delegate passes, register now and join leaders from across Europe's payments ecosystem as EBAday addresses 'The Turning Point in Payments Transformation'.