Background: Sweden and the rest of the world went through the biggest financial crisis at the end of 2008 since the 1930s. The major Swedish banks have goodwill related to their acquisitions inside and outside Scandinavia. Swedbank, SEB and Nordea has acquired in the Baltic countries and Russia, however Handelsbanken has established itself in Great Britain. The crisis in the Baltic countries led that real wages fell, unemployment rose, real estate prices collapsed and the number of borrowers who had trouble repaying their loans increased rapidly. All this led to the problem of impairment of goodwill in the Swedish banks that had expanded rapidly in the Baltic countries.

Aim: The aim of this study is to investigate the application of IFRS 3 in Swedish banks before, during and after the financial crisis, and to investigate the low-downs in the four majorSwedish banks in 2006-2010.

Completion: The study is primarily based on the case studies by the examination of the annual reports from all banks as well as evaluation of the interviews.The authors have chosen to makea strategic choice of a small number of cases through the concentration on the impairment of goodwill in the bank sector of Sweden.

Results: The result of this study is that there are problems for banks in implementation of IFRS 3 in practice because of insufficient information in the banks' financial statements.Generous estimates used in the calculation of impairment testing. All these led the banks tothe situation that they did not obtain the requirement of the new framework. The authors determine that the banks would have done more substantial work in calculating of the goodwill value than before. The authors also noted that the Swedish banks did not affected as hard by the financial crisis as the banks in the U.S., which led to the low impairment charges in Sweden.