PARIS - European authorities need to be able to tap into data from the SWIFT bank payments network under a push to clamp down on the financing of militant groups, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said on Monday.

Sapin said SWIFT - the world's biggest electronic payments system - had two computer servers, one in Europe and the other in the United States. However, Europe currently relied on U.S. authorities to collect and analyze the vast amounts of data flowing through the system to detect security issues.

"We Europeans don't have the capacity to exploit our own data. I don't think this can carry on this way," Sapin told a news conference. "Since we do not have the means to analyze the data located in Europe, we transfer all of this data to the Americans, who have the capacity to analyze it."

Efforts to curb financing of militant groups have intensified since the attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 by Islamic State-backed gunmen and bombers.

France will raise the SWIFT data issue at a meeting of euro zone finance ministers in Brussels on Monday, and has asked for questions related to the financing of terrorism to be discussed at the next meeting of finance ministers from all 28 European Union countries.(Reuters)