Finland (FI)

Finland runs the standard EEA licensing regime for payment services: FIN-FSA authorises and supervises payment institutions and e-money institutions under the Act on Payment Institutions (297/2010) and the Payment Services Act (290/2010), covering both provision of payment services and issuance of e-money.

FIN-FSA supervises all PSD2-regulated payment service providers in Finland, including third-party providers, which must be authorised or registered before commencing operations and appear on FIN-FSA's public register.

Finland's national MiCA transition period ran just six months and ended 30 June 2025, one of the shortest in the EU alongside the Netherlands, Latvia, Hungary and Slovenia, well ahead of the EU-wide maximum transition date of 1 July 2026 available to other member states; since 30 June 2025, only MiCA-authorised firms may issue e-money tokens or asset-referenced tokens or provide crypto-asset services in Finland.

DORA has applied in Finland since 17 January 2025, with FIN-FSA acting as the competent authority for DORA supervision of banks, insurers, investment firms, payment institutions, EMIs and crypto-asset service providers regardless of entity size.

PCI DSS defines the baseline technical and operational security requirements for any entity that stores, processes or transmits card data, applying to Finnish merchants, acquirers, processors and issuers on the Visa and Mastercard schemes.

Finland is a full SEPA member, eliminating the distinction between national and cross-border euro payments across the 36-market SEPA zone.

Finland's payments and banking market is dominated by three major deposit-bank groups - OP Financial Group, Nordea and Danske Bank - alongside smaller domestic players such as S-Pankki, Aktia and Saastopankki, with 247 credit institutions operating in Finland in 2023.

In August 2024, NYDFS fined Helsinki-headquartered Nordea Bank Abp USD 35 million for BSA/AML compliance failures and inadequate due diligence over high-risk correspondent-banking relationships including ABLV Bank and Luminor.

Acquiring of payment transactions is one of the payment services enumerated under the Act on Payment Institutions (297/2010); merchant-acquiring activity requires FIN-FSA payment-institution or credit-institution authorisation rather than a bespoke acquiring statute.

Account-to-account, pay-by-bank payments reached a 33% share of e-commerce transaction value in Finland in 2023, against a roughly 18% European average, making it Finland's fastest-growing payment method.

Finland has no UK-style mandatory APP-fraud reimbursement rule: banks must refund unauthorised payment transactions, with liability capped absent gross negligence, but are not required to refund authorised transfers where the customer was deceived into authorising the transaction.

This module's intelligence is sourced from the Sentinel.gi feed rather than original WPM analysis: Finland's AML/CFT framework rests on the Act on Detecting and Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (444/2017), supervised on a risk basis by FIN-FSA, with the National Bureau of Investigation's Financial Intelligence Unit receiving suspicious-transaction reports.

Correspondent banking is the module's analytical spine precisely because access runs overwhelmingly through bank-owned infrastructure, leaving non-bank PIs and EMIs dependent on those same banking relationships for cross-border settlement reach.

2025-07-01 - Product release (completed): Paxos Issuance Europe Oy launched USDG, a MiCA-regulated USD-denominated stablecoin, across Finland and the EEA; launch scale not publicly disclosed.