payments
P27
Nordic Payments
Cross-border payments as simple as texting.
By Srijan Sharma, Product Specialist, TCS Financial Solutions
Twenty-seven million people live in the
five Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark,
Finland, Norway, and Iceland.
Yet despite their geographic proximity and cultural
affinities, each country uses a separate currency: the
Danish kroner, the Icelandic krona, the Swedish krona,
the Norwegian krone, and in Finland, the euro.
This situation imposes challenges and costs for crossborder
transactions in the Nordics, which has high levels
of regional trade and travel.
That’s why banks in Denmark, Sweden and
Finland started P27, a joint initiative by Danske
Bank (Denmark), Handelsbanken (Sweden), Nordea
(Denmark), OP Financial Group (Finland), SEB
(Sweden) and Swedbank (Sweden).
P27 aims to build the world’s first real-time,
cross-border payment system to support multiple
currencies in multiple countries. Within the Nordic
countries, P27 will enable integrated payments for
domestic and cross-border payments. Also, P27 will
support transactions throughout the eurozone in
harmonization with Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)
standards.
P27 intends to establish a Nordics Payment
Platform (NPP) to be made available to other financial
institutions in the region. NPP will be modeled on
similar multi-country platforms that handle SEPA,
except that where SEPA platforms support only euro
payments, NPP will support multiple currencies.
The initial launch will support payments within
Denmark, Finland and Sweden, and the platform will
be expandable to allow for payments in other Nordic
countries.
The Nordics Payments Council (NPC) is working
toward defining the rulebooks and implementation
guidelines for P27, based on those created for SEPA by
the European Payments Council (EPC). P27 messages
will be built using ISO 20022 XML messages, enabling
high levels of flexibility, extensibility and straightthrough
processing, with efficient reconciliation and
AML compliance.
Go-live for the P27 initiative, subject to regulatory
approvals, is scheduled for mid-2021. The first phase
will involve building the underlying clearing platform
for NPP to support base-level functionality for the golive.
Concurrently, additional products and value-added
services will be developed to progressively enhance
the NPP platform over the next two to three years.
P27 will introduce enhancements and new features
throughout the development cycle, demanding banks
to manage continuous delivery for production roll-out
without impacting business as usual.
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