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Modernising the payments market

Instant payments are on the rise in Europe. In parallel, solutions are being developed to connect payment services and infrastructures to enable instant payments between countries and currencies. In Sweden, both the Riksbank’s and the privately-owned payment infrastructures are undergoing a major modernisation that will make payments more efficient and secure.

Published: 12 March 2026

Continued rise in instant payments

Instant payments mean that money is transferred directly, so that the recipient has it in their account within seconds of sending the payment. The EU is working to promote instant payments and, in line with this ambition, a new EU regulation, the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), was introduced and entered into force in October 2025. The regulation requires banks and other payment service providers that offer traditional euro account-to-account payments to also offer equivalent instant payment services, without charging a higher fee. In addition, these payment service providers should offer a free service that allows the consumer to verify the identity of the payee before the payment is authenticated (what is known as Verification of Payee). This requirement applies to both regular and instant payments.^[7] Regulation (EU) 2024/886 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 March 2024 amending Regulations (EU) No 260/2012 and (EU) 2021/1230 and Directives 98/26/EC and (EU) 2015/2366 as regards instant credit transfers in euro.

In Sweden, Swish is by far the largest instant payment service. According to the Riksbank’s latest survey on payment patterns in Sweden, 91 per cent of respondents have used Swish in the past month. Another company offering instant payments in Sweden is Vipps MobilePay. Since 2024, the company offers payments via a mobile app within Sweden but also between Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. However, not all banks in Sweden offer this service.

In the Vipps MobilePay service, payments are made in Sweden via card networks. This distinguishes it from Swish payments, which are made directly between the banks’ accounts in the Riksbank’s system. Offering mobile payments through the card networks’ systems means that merchants who currently accept card payments can easily start accepting this type of mobile payment as well. But it can also increase transaction costs and create risks compared to making payments directly between the banks’ accounts.^[8] Read more in the Staff memo European equivalents to Swish want to enable cross-border payments (Riksbank).

Modernisation of the Riksbank’s system

The Riksbank’s payment system RIX consists of two services: RIX-RTGS for large-value payments and aggregated payments and RIX-INST for individual instant payments.^[9] The RIX payment system (Riksbank), retrieved 19-02-2025. In May 2025, RIX-RTGS transitioned to the global message standard ISO 20022, which was an important step in the modernisation of the Swedish payment infrastructure. The new standard allows payment messages to contain more and better structured information, which means, among other things, that better checks can be made to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. As the standard is global, it also opens up for faster and more efficient processing of payments between countries and currencies. RIX-INST had already been adapted for this message standard.

Another important initiative is Bankgirot’s work on modernising the infrastructure for clearing in Swedish kronor. See the FACT BOX “Bankgirot is modernising and changing”.

FACT BOX – Bankgirot is modernising and changing

A key player in the Swedish payment market is Bankgirot. Bankgirot’s role is to combine and account for payments that its participants make to and from each other, which is known as clearing. The clearing documentation is sent by Bankgirot to the Riksbank, where the payments are finalised, which is called settlement. Payees then receive their payments. The payments that Bankgirot handles include bankgiro payments, transfers between different banks and direct debit payments.^[10] Bankgirot also provides account transfers between banks in the Dataclearingen system owned by Finance Sweden. Finance Sweden will use Bankgirot as a supplier of clearing services for payments in Dataclearingen until mid-2026, when the system will be phased out and replaced by Bankgirot’s modernised services for account transfers. Banks, payment institutions and e-money institutions can be participants in Bankgirot and use its services.

Bankgirot is owned by the company Finansinfrastruktur i Sverige AB (formerly P27), which in turn is owned by the largest banks in Sweden.^[11] Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB, Swedbank and Danske Bank. P27 was formed in 2017 by a number of Nordic banks with the aim of establishing a Nordic platform for clearing and settling payments between the Nordic currencies and the euro. Its aim was also to modernise and harmonise the Nordic payment infrastructure to comply with the applications of the ISO 20022 standard introduced in the EU via the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) initiative. SEPA makes it possible to send and receive euro account-to-account payments within the EU and some other countries as easily as domestic payments.^[12] See Regulation (EC) No 260/2012.

In parallel with the P27, the Nordic Payments Council (NPC) was also established with the task of managing Nordic regulations based on SEPA. In 2021, P27 bought Bankgirot with a view to taking over its operations, but then withdrew its application to conduct clearing activities in 2023. However, the company is still the owner of Bankgirot.

In 2024, Bankgirot was tasked by its owners to modernise, streamline and future-proof its operations by complying with NPC regulations. Another reason for the ongoing work is that Finansinspektionen has required Bankgirot’s owner banks to switch to ISO 20022 by December 2026 in order to comply with the anti-money laundering regulations.^[13] Major banks need to rectify deficiencies in the payments infrastructure (Finansinspektionen).

The ongoing work implies a changing role for both Bankgirot and its participants. In addition to the transition to ISO 20022, the work involves Bankgirot building a new clearing system. It will streamline Bankgirot’s business from offering services such as payroll and supplier payments, which were previously common to all participants’ customers, to primarily offering clearing services. Participants are thus tasked with offering these services themselves to their customers, whose transactions are then sent to Bankgirot for clearing.

The change in the division of responsibilities between Bankgirot and its participants means that the participants’ services will be different from each other, which in turn means that suppliers of financial and business systems will need to adapt their services to the respective participants. Another consequence is that the participants’ customers may need to adapt to new services if they move from one participant to another – for example, when a customer changes banks.

Another significant change resulting from the work is that Bankgirot is moving away from a model where only the same type of payment, such as salaries, is processed at fixed times for clearing. Instead, different types of payments will be processed at the same time. The current twelve fixed clearing dates will become ten. Finally, technical support is being prepared for ‘continuous clearing’. This means that in the future, a sending bank will itself be able to decide when to send its clearing file to Bankgirot, instead of adhering to the fixed submission times. This in turn may mean that more payments can be executed in a shorter period of time than before and that the line between instant and scheduled payments becomes blurred – at least during Bankgirot and RIX-RTGS’s opening hours.