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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

What's a good bank in Sweden, if I may ask? My personal experience is several hours (literally) wasted with Nordea, each time ending with something trivial not working (as someone new in Sweden, i.e only setting up bankID). So far, my personal experience with banking here is several orders of magnitude worse than in Germany, even (or because) everyone is proud on it being soo much more digitalized.

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I'm reasonably happy with SEB so far. I originally tried to get an account with SwedBank but they weren't interested until I had a personnummer (legally they're not supposed to refuse on this basis!) SEB were a lot more cooperative and set me up with a basic account (deposit for salary checks plus an ATM card) quickly. Most things seem to be fine through the website.

The one time I had to do some non-standard stuff they were pretty slow and a little disorganised, but it still seemed better than the UK banks I've used previously.

SEB is also quite a boomer bank? Still stuck with legacy numeric "usernames", manual limit changes from the office etc..

Username is your national id number, not really something strange in Sweden for banking.

OpenBank (part of Santander) also does this.... together with a 4 digit (only) password for internet-banking. Didn't know how fast I wanted to cancel that account after requesting it.

We went with Handelsbanken, because they were the first that let us sign up. So far seems OK. but I've not really done a detailed comparison.

I've been very happy with SEB and have found their customer service pretty great, even with pretty complex requests.

The being said, living in Sweden before you get your digital ID set up and everything sorted out in all the right databases seems to be a massive pain. All my non-Swedish colleagues at work have bureaucratic horror stories of their first months in the country.

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