P27 Nordic Payments acquired Bankgirot

P27 Nordic Payments Platform, a Stockholm, Sweden-based Nordic operator of a cross-border payment system in multiple currencies, announced that it signed an agreement to acquire Bankgirocentralen BGC AB (Bankgirot), Sweden’s only clearing house for mass payments.

The transaction, which has the financial details undisclosed, is conditioned on regulatory approvals, including merger approval by the European Commission and ownership assessment by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. P27 expects to be able to close the acquisition in Q1 2021.

The acquisition marks a very important step in P27’s ambition to create one common state-of-the-art payment platform in the Nordic countries.

P27 Nordic Payments Platform AB, led by CEO Lars Sjögren was founded in 2019 by six of the largest banks in the Nordics, Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB and Swedbank. The aim is to create one common state of the art payment platform in the Nordic countries. The work started in late 2017 with the ambition to go live 2021. The launch of P27 services is subject to a merger filing and clearing licence approval.

Bankgirot, established in 1959 by the Swedish banks and led by Magnus Sternbrink, is a proprietary clearing system (a giro) in Sweden used for account to account payments.

Bankgirot, backed by has approximately 165 employees, is the only clearing house for mass payments in Sweden and as such has a central role in the Swedish payments infrastructure. It handles transactions of a total value of approximately SEK 73 billion per day, including through its real-time payment service BiR, that enables the Swedish real time payment system Swish.