With over seven million users in Sweden, Swish has become a giant in the payment services market. For example, during October, over 47 million transfers were made to a total of SEK 22.2 billion according to recent statistics from Swish. This means that the Swedes swish around SEK 718 million - every day. There are also plans to expand abroad.

But Swish has not only made it possible for cashless Sweden to easily transfer money in no time. Last year, the financial police warned that clean money laundering with the help of Swish is relatively common.

At the same time, Getswish AB, the company behind Swish, does not have a license from Finansinspektionen, which means that the authority does not exercise any supervision over the app.

Despite the fiscal warnings, Åsa Thalén, head of the banking department at Finansinspektionen, does not want to comment on whether Swish should have a permit or not.

- I do not want to comment on individual companies or cases, answers Åsa Thalén, head of the banking department at Finansinspektionen.

Goes under the supervision of the banks

The arrangement, which is based on the fact that the six banks that own Swish have their own permits with Finansinspektionen, allows Swish to round the authority. At the same time, a quick survey of all the banks' press services shows that the arrangement is difficult to understand for them as well.

Several press figures are surprised when we ask if Swish has a permit and how the banks themselves do with the supervision of the company. For example, Swedbank answers as follows:

- Doesn't Swish have a permit? They are a company of their own, says Unni Jerndal, Press Manager at Swedbank.

Police criticism of the scheme

Now SVT News can tell you that the police want the rules to be tightened. In a home request (a formal request, ed. Note) that the National Operational Department, Noa, sent to the Justice Department last spring, the police are demanding that the rules be tightened.

In the document, which is exceptionally sharply worded, Noa requests that third party services such as Swish and BankID be subject to reporting obligations under the Money Laundering Act and thus become obliged to report suspicions of money laundering or terrorist financing.

Alternatively, the police want the Money Laundering Act to receive a review which means that the banks must be able to provide information about the entire transaction chain instead of being split between the different banks.

"Swish is a direct link in money laundering as the service enables crime profits with a high turnover rate to be layered in several stages," says the document that SVT News has taken note of.

Tracking is also made more difficult when money is transferred between different banks, according to Noa.