Summary: Modelling the interaction of an acoustic field in a fluid and an elastic structure submerged in the fluid leads to a system of complex linear equations with a complicated sparsity structure and, for higher wavenumbers and adequate modelling, the systems are very large. Direct methods are not practical. Preconditioned iterative methods, which are suitable for single operator equations, are not immediately applicable to the coupled case. This article proposes a block diagonal preconditioner of the sparse approximate inverse (SPAI) type that can accelerate the convergence of Krylov iterative solvers for the coupled system. Moreover, the proposed preconditioner can properly and implicitly scale the coupled matrix. Some numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method.