Analysis: Swish - everyone's and nobody's responsibility

“For you as Swishar, you can feel confident that we have the situation under control. Yes, the fact is that we have been in control since the start in 2012, when payments in Swish have always required signing with BankID. In other words, just swish on as usual! ”

So it says on the website of the company behind the Swish app, Getswish Ab. With six owned major banks and no own payment service permit, safe is not the word that comes up spontaneously. When our payments have been digitized, an effective check that second-hand swish payments are not utilized by light-shaded elements has been forgotten. This is clear after SVT News's review.

Six months ago, the police alerted the Justice Department; "The police have seen indications that transactions that deviate from a normal transaction pattern are not adequately captured by the operators' monitoring"

In ordinary Swedish: the banks, which co-own Swish, do not have sufficient control over whether fast money transfers are used for money laundering or terrorist financing. The police demanded that the supervision of the payment service be tightened.

The police's formal request to the Ministry of Justice shows how easy it is to get around Swish's daily maximum limit of SEK 150,000 for anyone who wants to use the system. By using Swish from different banks, or deactivating and activating the app from the same number, you can repeatedly transfer large sums of money.

The creep holes appear to be many and the coordination zero.

Last year, 400 million payments were made through Swish worth more than SEK 200 billion. Swish is no longer just for that coffee at the football game but has moved into the financial finery.

The national strategy against money laundering and terrorist financing from 2014 to which the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority refers on its website states that money laundering and terrorist financing are seen as a systemic threat.

That is, if banks and financial institutions become simple tools for criminals, trust in the entire financial system can be threatened. Secondary payments with Swish are mentioned zero times in the national strategy. It's no wonder - Swish was new in 2014 and not a particularly big problem for then-finance minister Peter Norman. When the Riksbank presented its report "How the Swedes pay in 2019" yesterday, it appears that Swish has tripled, while cash withdrawals have halved in the last five years. We prefer to swish rather than withdraw cash and the development is accelerating.

Finansinspektionen, which oversees Swish owners - six Swedish major banks, gives a non-response to the question how they ensure that Swish is not used to finance terrorism or money laundering.

“It is the banks that are under our supervision, not Swish or Bank ID. It is those who are under supervision that we oversee. Then the banks have a reporting requirement on them from different perspectives for their services and products that they deliver, ”says Åsa Thalén, Head of Banking Law at Finansinspektionen to SVT.

Crystal clear, right? And it does not become clearer when SVT asks the banks. At Money Laundered Swedbank, the Communications Manager does not even know that Swish does not have its own payment service permit.

According to the Riksbank, Swish is seen as an efficient payment service in an international perspective and the company is now planning a European launch.

The banks should estimate their lucky star that so has not yet happened. Given the US authorities' investigations of SEB and Swedbank, and billion fines to Nordea for their lack of control in the Baltic - this could be a very expensive expansion.