Are you smart enough for Nordea’s online banking?

Since everything concerning on-line banking should be absolutely dummy proof, I think it is worth to share some of the experiences I made with the on-line banking of the Nordea bank account I opened a short while ago.

The first big challenge is to log in the on-line system. You can do this ones you got your smart card and the little code generator machine. The first question I was dealing with was, if I have to connect the little machine to my computer via the USB cable, which was also in the box of the machine. As it turns out, the machine got an autonomous power supply and one should not try to connect the little machine to the computer. It works perfectly fine if you just put your smart card into it – otherwise it shows some strange symbols on its display. However, once you made this you have to face the next problem.

So as the instructions tell you, you should try to find the log in form. The problem here is that the English instructions are obviously older than the system and they do not fit to each other. So one just has to find the little link “e-kod” somewhere on the homepage of Nordea.

I figured out that the translation function of Google quite good to manage the rest of the procedures. The only thing, which is quite confusing is that one has to “Sign” some actions and sometimes you have to “Login”. So I realy do not get the point of those security procedures – althogh I am quite interested in user friendly and secure computer systems. So what I want to say is, I would not consider myself a dummy concerning computer systems and all this, however I had a realy hard time to find out how to use this system. This is probably not only because of bad usabilty of the system but also because of my swedish skills, which are not as fabulous as I whish they were.

So to make a little conclusion: if you are planing to get an bank account in Sweden then it might be a good idea to find somebody how knows how it works first. Or go to bank which got an online bank system in English.

Cheers

Opening a bank account in Sweden

In order to open a bank account in Sweden you normally need a Swedish “Personnummer”, which is a kind of a id number. However, the KTH has an agreement with the Nordea Bank that exchange students may open a bank account without having such a number. To open such an account makes sense since picking up cash at a bankomat kosts usually at least 5 Euro or 1%. Further, paying the rent for the dormitory room is possible via internet banking for free (but not from outside Sweden…).

All you need is:

• Your Letter-of-Acceptance
• The Tax-Form
• The Student-Account-Form

You can get these forms at the international office, which is on Valhallavägen.