Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

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All European banks require you have the app to be able to do anything with your account. The is more of compliance/regulatory thing.

And to login into my work, I need to first login into my laptop and then enter into a very elaborate way of login into VPN or company WiFi. VPN/WiFi login requires you to first login into company app on your mobile to get a temp password. The company app need to work with other auth apps in a very complex way, making you hop through multiple ID checks. It is very likely that one of these apps might not like your speed of response and block you, requiring you create an incident ticket which itself requires logging into your account first. Since you can't create the ticket, you will call help desk and wait for half-day as they keep shifting your ticket across support queues.

Not true in all of Europe. Here in Denmark you need to have the state-issued identification app MitId ("My Id"), and most (all?) banks use it for authentication. Both for websites, and even when making a (larger?) transfer in their own app. You practically need that MitId app anyway, it is used for so many things, from the tax office to online payments to library cards.

Things are the other way in Finland, where each bank has its own identification app, and many official sites require you to use one for identifying yourself.

> All European banks require you have the app to be able to do anything with your account. The is more of compliance/regulatory thing.

This is not true in Sweden. I use three different banks in Sweden, and they all offer equal or more functionality on their mobile version websites.

This wasn’t always the case, though. In the early 2010s, I remember a bank blocking mobile user agents and referring to their app instead, due to “security”. I’m glad there has been some progress in the right direction since then.

So this is as most things wrong with the EU and tech is about overzealous regulators..

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