INTERVIEW | At PostTrade 360°’s conference, Hanna Vainio, CEO of Euroclear Nordics, charted the journey of a Nordic CSD from ambition to execution — with Finland and Sweden on one platform and expansion set for Denmark and Norway.
Issuers in the Nordic market will have the ability to use one CSD platform and hold one account with Euroclear, which establishes the official, primary record of a security’s issuance in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.
“Our ambition is to become the preferred Nordic CSD,” says Vainio, drawing a comparison with Euroclear’s Euronext Settlement of Euronext-zone Securities (ESES), the single, unified technical securities-processing platform it rolled out across Belgium, France and the Netherlands between 2007 and 2009.
The Nordic platform builds on the system already in production in Finland, which is compliant with T2S — the harmonised pan-European settlement platform. That system is now being extended to support Sweden’s migration to T2S in September 2030, as agreed with Swedish market participants in May 2025.
As part of the transformation, Sweden’s CSD has adopted cloud-based technology, forming a scalable platform aligned with European market standards and designed to enhance straight-through processing (STP). The move builds on a decade-long partnership between TCS and Euroclear, following TCS’s earlier role in modernising the group’s Finnish CSD.
Together, these deployments complete Euroclear Nordic´s transformation strategy, delivering a unified, cloud-ready Nordic CSD platform across Sweden and Finland.
“Sweden will join T2S by using the platform we built for Finland’s T2S migration back in 2023. That was the original Nordic strategy,” Vainio says. “Now we are executing it, and I’m happy to say the first Nordic features of the platform will go live in November this year.”
When PostTrade 360° caught up with Vainio at Sibos last year, she outlined the steps on Sweden’s path to T2S, dominated by a year of negotiations with the European Central Bank and the wider market community. “It’s a process we have to follow, but for me it’s about keeping the pace — getting this done, getting the market ready, and delivering quality,” she said.
One Nordic platform, one account model
Vainio is emphatic that the Nordic build is not two separate systems running in parallel. “We’re putting this in production in one location, which will, over time, ease the migration of the Swedish market onto the platform,” she says. “And I want to be very precise: this is not two instances of a platform. This is truly one Nordic platform and one account model for these markets.”
The pitch to the market is one of simplicity: a single account and a harmonised infrastructure spanning the region should lower the barriers to holding Nordic instruments across borders, cutting the operational complexity that comes with dealing separately with each domestic market.
That confidence is grounded in overlap between the two markets already using the system: Sweden and Finland share 13 clients, who between them hold more than 90% of the assets held in Stockholm. “Those clients are already familiar with the software — they’ve migrated to T2S,” Vainio notes. The remaining 10%, made up of smaller local participants, will need closer support as the market moves, but the scale of existing overlap “gives us confidence.”
“We’ve learned our lessons through the Finnish transformation, and I’m proud that we have a modern CSD system,” she says. “We have no legacy debt, and our data is in one place and is very structured.” Client dialogue is ongoing, she adds — partly to gather input, partly to train the market on T2S, harmonised standards and ISO messaging. “That’s gone very well. I hear very good feedback.”
Still, Vainio acknowledges the scrutiny that comes with change. “Over time you start to realise there are questions coming from clients and stakeholders as to why not use the original CSD, which has been around in this market,” she says. “But the ambition of a Nordic CSD has always been there. Somebody just needs to deliver it. We’re in a very good place.”
Next stop: Denmark and Norway
With the Nordic system now in production, Euroclear’s next ambition is Denmark — a market it sees as a natural next step for two reasons: it is already T2S-compliant, and Nasdaq runs its stock exchange.
Norway is a longer-term prospect; its decision to join T2S has not yet been made. “Norway is interesting because it has similarities with Finland, including a mandatory beneficial-account requirement — investor accounts for Norwegian citizens. Investors have to hold their securities account in their own name,” Vainio says. “Our system is ready to accommodate that requirement — it’s about scale efficiency.”
For now, the focus is on engaging market participants and authorities to gauge appetite, in what Vainio describes as an unusual operating environment. Conversations with regulators tend to centre on continuity and resilience, alongside the balance between savings and investment union ambitions and local market needs. “CSDs have been very focused on one domestic market,” she says. “Going international will take time to digest — and whether participants are forward-leaning depends a lot on the world we live in now, and on this region’s specificities.”
As Vainio puts it in her LinkedIn post: with the market, for the market.
