Having worked in finance, what surprises me is this stuff doesn't happen more often.
I still work in finance. This is nowhere even close to the worst thing I've seen just this week.
Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most popular tends to go in opposite direction of quality - people look at the fees heavily and tend to go to cheapest solutions. Now it can be claimed that cheap != low quality and there are certainly some exceptions out there, but generally you get what you par for.
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.
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.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#33Most popular bank in Sweden. Keep in mind that you don't use cash in Sweden.
Not at all? Even in Norway, cash is still used to a small degree.
I haven't handled physical cash for probably ten years. They redesigned the bills around 2015 and to be honest I'm not even sure how they look anymore.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#34Most popular bank in Sweden. Keep in mind that you don't use cash in Sweden.
Not at all? Even in Norway, cash is still used to a small degree.
Sweden's probably even more cashless than Norway.
Even if you have cash, which most people don't, it's hard to spend. Grocery stores still take it so it would actually be useful in this situation, but other than grocery stores I struggle to think of any places in my city that accept cash. Maybe some bigger outlets do, not sure, but restaurants, cafes, takeaway places, small specialty stores and the like certainly do not take cash.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you might have some entertaining stories?
Once upon a time in the dark ages of IT a Dutch bank made a mistake in their interest calculations. One alert customer noticed the error and notified the bank but that was not before 100's of thousands of people received papers with the wrong amounts on them (in favor of the bank). That took a while to correct.
I worked at one FI in Australia that shipped a bug that impacted interest payments, except in this case they used the wrong 'from' date: the account opening date instead of the last interest date.
Some long-standing accounts received very large cheques (it was the 90s, so yes, cheques).
The FI gave the customers the choice to either return the cheques or have future interest payments withheld. Surprisingly the vast majority simply returned the cheques.
We had to write additional code to clawback the interest on the other accounts. I doubt if the FI would have had any recourse if people had just closed their accounts and kept the cheque but to the best of my knowledge nobody did.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 t…
SEB is also quite a boomer bank? Still stuck with legacy numeric "usernames", manual limit changes from the office etc..
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#37Most popular bank in Sweden. Keep in mind that you don't use cash in Sweden.
Not at all? Even in Norway, cash is still used to a small degree.
Visiting Malmö I see restaurants with "card only" signs on the door and in the menu.
Denmark has taken measures to require most businesses to accept cash, but Sweden doesn't seem to have done that. I keep ~1000DKK at home for emergencies, but I haven't purchased anything with cash for... um... a long time. Perhaps once in the last year.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a UI issue. People that are affected by this cannot use their debit cards in stores or withdraw cash at ATMs or banks. People are having to borrow money from friends and colleagues to buy food for the weekend.
Sadly, we'll never get a post-mortem analysis. Good luck to all those affected and I hope for them that the bank follows standard practices when handling transactions bookkeeping. The balance should be easy to recalculate.
We might not get a detailed, technical post-mortem, but I expect someone (the bank, a government regulator) will want to know what happened and why, and there will be some sort of report.
Here's an example reporting on an IT failure at a British bank: https://home.barclays/content/dam/home-barclays/documents/ci...
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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.
Re: Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update
#40Most popular bank in Sweden. Keep in mind that you don't use cash in Sweden.
Maybe popular, but from the several scandals surrounding that bank in the last few years, you should have changed bank long ago. (Most recently laundering Russian oligarch money iirc)
> laundering
If you try to find a bank that isn't filled with criminal minds, you will never find one.