Swedbank AB, a Nordic-Baltic banking group headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, has reportedly chosen payment services and infrastructure company SIA to help it send instant payments via the EBA Clearing’s RT1 platform.
Swedbank provides retail banking, asset management, and various other financial services. Swedbank has more than 900,000 private and 130,000 corporate customers and notably a 60% market share of Estonia’s payments industry.
Swedbank’s IT systems are connected to SIA’s fibre optic network
Swedbank and SIA are also partnering with TietoEVRY, a Finland-based software development company, which will offer an open architecture that will be used to connect the newly developed payments ecosystem.
Swedbank’s management confirmed that the platform has connected to SIAnet, the vendor’s fibre optic network-based infrastructure. Customers of the firm have conducted 30 million instant payments via the network.
SIA’s developers said that Swedbank’s clients will benefit from a 10-year concession offered by the European Central Bank to SIA and as a Network Service Provider for the Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway, which will be introduced in November 2021.
EBA Clearing introduced RT1 in November 2017 as an infrastructure platform for handling instant SEPA credit transactions.
The new payment system runs “around the clock on any day of the year.” It assists payment service providers in conducting Euro-based transactions between different payment accounts in “less than 10 seconds end to end.”
Swedbank, SIA and TietoEVRY aim to provide access to Target2 large payments settlement; TIP, the instant payments settlement platform; TARGET2-Securities (T2S), the securities settlement platform; the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS); and P27, the new Nordic Payments Platform.