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The Switch
15 Nov 2023 08:20 pmMost of the banking in Finland is online now.
That started happening around the time I moved here, in 2004, but in more recent years they've closed lots of branches and made the remaining ones appointment-only. Most daily tasks can be done quickly and readily online if you have a smartphone and the internet, and the mobile phone density in Finland is higher than one per person; children usually get one when they start school now. So I'm not saying this is all bad, but it makes it harder to deal with unusual circumstances if you can't go ask a question. And they've made customer service harder to access, as well as typically outsourced.
So the only bank that even has an office branch in our little town of 19k is Ã…landsbanken, which is very small but has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any bank in Finland. They're next door to work and handle our banking for us, mostly free of the usual fees, so they're a significant sponsor of our charity chapter. As a result I'm pretty acquainted with both the regular tellers - they only have two most of the time (a few substitutes or summer workers sometimes) - and one of them has been there like forty years. We're friendly.
They have our mortgage too, so Wax has a mostly-unused account there, as a result of which we know that their services and connections work fine. Because of work I know more about their online bank system than my own too, so I decided to switch.
... It's a bit scary to switch, though, with how important it is. Banks have such a good electronic authentication system that it's what is used to verify identity for everything online including the government. I lost my codes once when I switched phones and had to go queue for hours for an emergency appointment at the nearest branch bank in Turku. (But after this if that happens it'll be a much shorter trip, anyway.)
That started happening around the time I moved here, in 2004, but in more recent years they've closed lots of branches and made the remaining ones appointment-only. Most daily tasks can be done quickly and readily online if you have a smartphone and the internet, and the mobile phone density in Finland is higher than one per person; children usually get one when they start school now. So I'm not saying this is all bad, but it makes it harder to deal with unusual circumstances if you can't go ask a question. And they've made customer service harder to access, as well as typically outsourced.
So the only bank that even has an office branch in our little town of 19k is Ã…landsbanken, which is very small but has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any bank in Finland. They're next door to work and handle our banking for us, mostly free of the usual fees, so they're a significant sponsor of our charity chapter. As a result I'm pretty acquainted with both the regular tellers - they only have two most of the time (a few substitutes or summer workers sometimes) - and one of them has been there like forty years. We're friendly.
They have our mortgage too, so Wax has a mostly-unused account there, as a result of which we know that their services and connections work fine. Because of work I know more about their online bank system than my own too, so I decided to switch.
... It's a bit scary to switch, though, with how important it is. Banks have such a good electronic authentication system that it's what is used to verify identity for everything online including the government. I lost my codes once when I switched phones and had to go queue for hours for an emergency appointment at the nearest branch bank in Turku. (But after this if that happens it'll be a much shorter trip, anyway.)
