A report by FI, Sweden’s financial supervisory authority, found that the number of accounts forcibly closed by Sweden’s banks grew from 45,000 in 2020 to 60,000 in 2022 as banks sought to reduce money laundering risks. 

According to the report, The right to a debit account – an assessment of the financial authority’s oversight, many people in Sweden are also refused accounts.

“Often this is something that happens to people who lack the traditional Swedish ID documents, or people who come from countries outside the Europe and who are in Sweden to work or to study,” Malin Alpen, Executive Director of Payments at the authority, wrote in an opinion piece in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper. 

Sweden’s government last year instructed the authority to look at how it carries out its task of supervising how well banks in Sweden are respecting the right have to a debit account. 

The authority stressed in the report that being unable to have a payment account causes “big problems” for those affected, so banks should if possible prefer other, less drastic ways of reducing the risk of money laundering, by offering accounts which only allow a limited size of transfer or other limited services, or accounts with a greater level of scrutiny. 

“It’s difficult to manage your everyday life without a  bank accounts. The banks should combat money laundering, but there’s a risk that people accounts are being limited more than is necessary,” Alpen said in a press release. 

Banks also appeared to be taking decisions at a group level, rather than assessing each application in its own right, she added, something she warned could paradoxically increase the risk of money laundering by forcing large numbers of people into using unregulated, alternative ways of transferring money. 

The report said that Sweden’s banks had made some improvements, with an improved system for following up on decisions to close or deny accounts and better collecting and sharing of statistics. 

Nonetheless, it added, consumers were still being denied accounts or having their accounts closed “relatively extensivlely”, meaning banks should bring a renewed focus to loweing the threshold for being given an account which at least allows people to carry out daily transactions