What CFOs Are Asking Themselves Right Now Before Sweden's Bankgirot Shuts Down

Quick Summary for Busy CFOs

Bankgirot is being phased out. For CFOs, this means more than a tech change — it's a shift in how payments, compliance, and treasury are managed. Supplier flows will become more error-prone, approval trails will scatter, reconciliation will slow down, and IT will feel the strain of bank-by-bank integrations.

Good news is, this isn't a black box. The changes are known, the risks are clear, and the path to readiness is doable — especially if you start early. Platforms like Visualizy already solve parts of this complexity, giving finance teams a head start. This post breaks down the risks and gives a clear playbook to stay ahead of the change.

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Bankgirot Phase-Out

Bankgirot, Sweden’s long-standing domestic payment hub, is being phased out. The first shutdowns begin in 2026. For most CFOs, this won’t just change where files get sent. It changes how your entire finance stack operates.

If you missed the breakdown, check out our recent pieces on the transformation timeline (here) and the wider system implications (here).

This post zooms in on the CFO lens: What breaks, what gets messy, and what to fix now before the switch flips.

1. From One Pipe to Many

Today, your team sends one payment file to Bankgirot and they route your payments. Tomorrow, you need to manage bank-by-bank flows. Each bank gets its own:

• Format
• Validation rules
• Cut-off times
• Error messages

Going from one pipe to many means rethinking your whole payment architecture. Each new pipe introduces small differences — and those differences add up into risk, manual effort, and error.

2. Supplier Payment Risk Increases

With Bankgirot’s Supplier Payment (in Swedish: Leverantörsbetalningar) being shut down, supplier payment flows now depend on how well each bank handles payment file intake, validation, and cut-off rules.

Expect:

• More rejected or delayed payments
• Extra pressure from suppliers on payment accuracy
• Operational overhead just to keep normal flows running

This isn't just admin work. It may well put your supplier relationships at risk.

3. Fragmented Compliance & Audit Trails

Different banks = different log structures, different metadata, different access rules. If your approvals and flows are scattered, your audit trail is too.

What to watch for:

• Gaps in payment approvals
• Manual rework to prove control
• Risk exposure during audit and compliance reviews

You need consistent logging, regardless of where the payment originated across the banks you work with. Your audit trails will be broken if you don't pull them into one place.

4. Treasury Planning Gets Harder

Without a central hub, treasurers will rely on scattered payment data. That means:

• Forecasting becomes slower and reactive
• Liquidity decisions lack clarity
• You waste time reconciling the past instead of planning the future

If treasury can’t trust its view, strategy becomes guesswork.

5. Approvals Go Backward

Centralized approval chains break apart as payment initiation becomes fragmented. Some banks don’t support group-level controls. Others don’t offer any structured approval workflows.

It results in shadow approvals over email, or full-blown process confusion.

You’ll need to rebuild:

• Role-based access across accounts and subsidiaries per bank
• Unified approval trails
• Audit-ready logs across entities

6. Financial Quarter-Close Starts Hurting

In a fragmented world, reconciliation gets messy. Bankgirot's structured feedback and image-based reconciliation (like BG Inbetalningar) are going away. You'll need to:

• Handle more failed transactions manually
• Reconcile statements across inconsistent formats
• Look for missing payment metadata from multiple sources

If you’re not planning for this, close cycles will slow down and accounting accuracy will degrade.

7. Your IT Will Be Overloaded

Every  change here has a backend cost. Your IT team will need to:

• Rebuild integrations per bank
• Manage different authentication and security flows
• Handle updates and testing across fragmented bank protocols

What once called common ISO20022 standard varies across different banks. 

And your IT team to do this while maintaining everything else. The risk is that most internal teams will be able to carry this transition alone.

The Playbook: What CFOs Should Do Now

1. Map your dependencies. Where are you still relying on Bankgirot? Which banks and payment types?
2. Talk to your ERP vendor. Do they support ISO 20022 with direct bank integrations? Across which banks? Does it require manual work for? How are you going to approve payments across your entities and accounts?
3. Run a visibility audit. Do you have real-time access to payments, payment tracking, balances, flows, and approvals across all entities?
4. Pressure test approvals. If your current system breaks, what happens? Who gets locked out?
5. Prepare to abstract. One integration per bank isn’t scalable. You need a control layer, not another custom script.

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My advice to CFOs is don't just treat this as a migration project if your organization is complex and you have multiple bank relationships. It’s a finance operations and process rebuild. You will need to plan now, and get expert help. 

If you’re navigating this shift and need to think through architecture or transition strategies, we’re here. Contact Us