This is a digital tombstone dedicated to telling the remarkable Intergiro story, and paying homage to the incredible people that made Intergiro the unique and special place that it was.
If you were a customer of Intergiro and believe your funds are being held by the administrator, you need to go here.
We hope you can take away some lessons from our experience and that it serves as a cautionary reminder of just how challenging and unpredictable doing business in Europe has become in 2025.
TL;DR:
- Intergiro filed for bankruptcy at the Stockholm district court on 31/07/25, after an unprecedented decision by the Swedish financial regulator (the SFSA) to revoke the financial licence on the 18/06/25.
- The regulator decided that administrative failings in an April 2021-April 2022 dataset should result in a licence revocation in June 2025, despite no actual money laundering or any type of financial crime being discovered in the investigation.
- On the face of it this seems illogical, but becomes clearer when it is understood that the regulator came under extreme media pressure in Q1 2025 from some reporters fabricating a bogus story to get more clicks.
- The Swedish FSA decided to reduce this media pressure by killing Intergiro, ruining people's lives and causing a remarkable trail of destruction in the process.
The Company
Intergiro was a Swedish B2B Fintech. It employed just under 100 people across the EEA, and was growing 2-3x year-over-year, reaching €20M ARR, and achieving profitability by mid-2024-all totally bootstrapped, without VC or institutional backing.
Moreover, they were doing something incredibly hard: a pioneer in the embedded payments space, they were building complicated payments infrastructure that was designed to be 'white-labelled' within non-financial brands, whilst retaining the full compliance and legal burden of modern financial services.
Think the Starbucks loyalty card or Shopify, two products that could not exist without embedded providers like Intergiro.
The team had evolved from a rag-tag group of builders to a highly professional outfit and weathered countless storms along the way.
They often joked their journey might one day become a Netflix documentary.
How tragically prescient that may turn out to be.
The People
And what a team it was. Optimistic, kind, talented and endlessly resourceful, the overarching feeling was that this place felt different… these people feel different.
There was a culture of no-holds-barred, brutally honest problem solving. You worked together to solve hard problems and helped others to do the same.
The management team's policy was full transparency, on everything, no matter how tough or scary... and there was one last tricky thing that needed to be closed.
The AML Survey
Despite its success and fantastic people, one lingering issue remained: a sector-wide AML survey initiated in May 2022-not triggered by any specific incident, but part of the SFSA's regular supervisory work.
Intergiro was criticised in 3 areas: the business wide risk assessment document was deemed to lack detail, some KYC files on high risk clients needed more detail and police reporting was often late and sometimes missing.
In response to the criticism, Intergiro hired Sweden's top compliance consultancy and launched an extraordinarily ambitious remediation plan.
By December 2023, nine months after receiving initial criticism and millions of Euro spent, the company surprised even itself by completing the ambitious plan on time.
At that point, every single AML related process had been completely redesigned and implemented from the floor up, even things not criticised.
During this process, the company had taken the extraordinary steps of blocking all onboarding, offboarding a 3rd of the client base and making half of its staff redundant, taking the compliance related staff from under 20% to a remarkable 40% of total headcount.
This monumental effort was objectively paying off: fraud recall rates (the SFSAs metric of focus) was down to 0.016% in 2025, well below the last published EU average of 0.022%.
Most reassuring of all was the sheer passage of time: no competent regulator could claim that administrative findings from a 2021 dataset justified revoking a licence in 2025.
Or so everyone thought...
The Shock Decision
At 8 a.m. on June 18 2025, Intergiro discovered without warning-via the SFSA's website, at the same time as the public that its licence had been revoked.
A lack of warning and ambiguous communication caused banking partners to halt services almost immediately. The company's complex treasury and customer operations processes were immediately incapacitated, with the best part of €1bn of monthly customer payments halted at various stages of the payment journey.
The decision was utterly baffling and unexpected. The SFSA hadn't revoked a licence for AML failings since 2014-and never in its history for a first-time offence.
One had to assume there had been some very egregious findings: large-scale laundering, evidence tampering or perhaps systemic deception.
The Twist
But the final decision document listed nothing of the sort. No money laundering, or any financial crime, no obstruction.
Only the same administrative shortcomings mentioned in the original March 2023 criticism: a risk assessment document deemed insufficiently detailed, some KYC files needing more depth, and police reporting that was slow or incomplete.
The dataset used in the investigation was from 2021, Intergiro's first year of commercial traction, so Intergiro readily admitted its processes in those areas were immature and needed improvement, something that was immediately and urgently done in its 2023 remediation plan.
Furthermore, all the publicly available data was showing the regulator that the 2025 version of Intergiro was a totally different prospect: police reporting was at all-time highs: Intergiro filed a remarkable 90% of all EMI police reports in Sweden in 2024 and fraud recall rates were at all-time lows, well below the EU average.
It simply didn't add up.
Enter the Journalist
Things start to make a lot more sense when you learn that Joachim Dyfvermark entered the arena sometime in Q4 2024: a sensationalist 'investigative' reporter from SVT's Uppdrag Granskning.
An important piece of context in this story is that Joachim and SVT in general are highly regarded and generally believed by the Swedish public.
Joachim aired a 45-minute primetime 'exposé' on SVT, alleging that Intergiro was founded and run by a criminal cabal.
The inaccuracies in the journalism were staggering:
- Main Premise - The show claimed Intergiro was founded and secretly run by Thomas Jisander, a famous Swedish 90s white-collar criminal. Few at Intergiro had even heard of Jisander and he had never had any connection to the company.
- "Six Criminal Shareholders" - Intergiro was a public company, and so they had no control over who traded and held their shares. After a retrospective Intergiro found only 2/60+ shareholders that had any kind of legal infringements, and those owners had no Board seats or influence in any way.
- Fraud Case Misrepresentation - The show implied an ongoing fraud case when in fact it had been closed several years before.
- False Linkages - The show suggested fraud cases must be tied to criminal shareholders. Not a single fraud case was ever linked to any shareholder, and a multi-year AML investigation supports that.
- Hidden Shareholders - The show claims that because Intergiro didn't have a large shareholder, with all under 10% there must be a scheme at play to hide certain criminals. In reality, Intergiro had a 40% shareholder for its whole existence up until 2024 and it was a coincidence that they sold to several smaller shareholders.
It was click-bait journalism at its shameful best, but the most damaging moment came when Dyfvermark paraded SFSA Director Daniel Barr on camera to drill him on how he could possibly let a criminal organisation have a financial licence in Sweden.
What a surprise: just days after the episode aired, the SFSA broke their years long silence on the essentially dormant 2022 investigation with a 'supplementary request for comments', retracting earlier findings (from the 2021 dataset!) and replacing them with 20 pages of new criticism.
A Worrying Pattern Repeats
It's clear in hindsight that the Swedish media (SVT) pulled off an impressive regulatory capture strategy.
They created a click-bait media storm, for their own gain, to exert maximum pressure on the SFSA.
They got extremely lucky in that the Director General of the SFSA, Daniel Barr, was in hot water himself for a separate issue, and so at his most vulnerable to media pressure at the time of the TV interview. He was eventually fired and 17/06/25 was his very last day in office, and the fateful day that the SFSA was to vote on Intergiro's future.
Only later did it become clear this strategy was not novel. Jan Söderqvist's book 'Executed' documents almost the exact same strategy in its 'takedown' of Swedbank-again led by the same Journalist: Joachim Dyfvermark.
Some Context on the SFSA
Most of the administrative AML (and other) regulations are subjective. This means firms need guidance and communication from their regulator if they are to have a chance of aligning on interpretations.
But the SFSA refuses to provide guidance or advice, and firms are unwilling to ask because the SFSA are extremely aggressive.
The problem with this aggressive approach is that it precedes incompetence. Intergiro experienced this first hand when they spent thousands of words explaining concepts like payment recalls and friendly fraud, explanations that either fell on deaf ears or were too complicated to understand for regulators more accustomed to dealing with banks than payment companies.
Lastly, they are appallingly hypocritical. When Intergiro requested all the internal communications on the case, the critical last 12 months were conspicuously missing. The period when the investigation suddenly escalated from a sleepy, low priority survey, to an urgent "risk to the financial system". A period that just so happened to include the media storm and the SFSA's decision to replace the original 2023 findings with new ones.
Takeaway
The Intergiro case raises profound questions:
- How can a journalist broadcast demonstrable falsehoods on national television with impunity?
- How can a regulator in such a respected jurisdiction allow itself to be so obviously captured by the popular media?
- Why has the Swedish judicial system offered no meaningful recourse despite such an obvious miscarriage of justice?
Intergiro's downfall shows that Europe's problem is not just bureaucracy-it's also susceptibility.
Without reliable and upstanding institutions, the system fails. Lawfare is used to weaponise rules that were designed in good faith to protect public interest.
Capital, talent, and innovation can be destroyed not by market forces, but by perception, politics, and spectacle.
Unless these dynamics change, Europe's ambitions will always be undermined from within.
