Looking back

Nordea is admittedly one of Nordic more recent bank names but the bank traces its roots as far back as to 1820. To date 250 banks have been incorporated and many exciting events have taken place. Did you know for instance that HC Andersen was one of Nordea’s first customers?

He didn’t of course know this himself, since the name of the bank at that time was Sparekassen for Kjøbenhavn og Omegn. It opened in 1820 and is therefore the oldest member of the Nordea family. At that time saving money in a bank was quite a new phenomenon. The few banks that existed earlier in the Nordic countries dealt mostly with issue of banknotes and credits, and were not intended for ordinary people. However, savings campaigns were at the time in progress all over Europe, inspired by the Age of Enlightenment’s ideas concerning combating poverty through diligence and thrift, and savings banks were opened all over the place.

HC Andersen indeed responded to the savings requirements of the day. He was born poor, but when he died in 1875 he had, counted in today’s money, several million in the bank.

Vodka as security

Parallel to the development of business sector during the first half of the 1800s, the need also arose for another kind of bank, a credit provider, of which Christiania Kreditkasse the oldest Nordea bank in Norway is an example. It was founded in 1848 by Oslo’s tradesmen’s association, so that its members would not need to deal with expensive credits via the trading houses in Hamburg and Copenhagen.

Security was in tangible form. Kreditkassen’s first customer, a merchant called Evensen, was granted a loan secured by 4,000 pots of vodka, corresponding to 3,862 litres. The liquor was driven away to the bank’s warehouse and was later returned according to the rate at which Evensen paid off his debt. The staff at the beginning comprised three people: bank manager, head teller and warehouse manager who watched over the items of security.

After the First World War commercial life assumed much greater proportions. Great quantities of money changed hands constantly and necessitated simpler and safer ways to transfer them than was possible with cash. Swedish Postgirot, which eventually became a part of Nordea, was one of the pioneers in the world when it started its payment services in 1925. The workplace itself was considered one of the most modern in the Nordic countries with staff dining room, sun terrace and sickroom with trained employees. And for the time they had the most up-to-minute office techniques and bookkeeping apparatus.

Sverker the Miracle Machine

Bank employees in the 1800s had however little in the way of technical facilities. With steel nib in hand the bookkeeping young ladies and the head teller would mostly use mental arithmetic, a science that is falling into oblivion. Try it out yourself and calculate annual interest on your home loan in your head, and you will realise the difficulty involved.  Competitions were held in the subject to keep the staff alert. In the 1950s ready-made interest tables were in use, to which the only the figures needed to be added. In spite of the fact calculators also existed, it was a time-consuming and monotonous job, which was frequently assigned to the youngest members of staff on New Year's Eve.

Already then, in the 1950s, account data was stored automatically with the help of punch card machines, which was a preparation of sorts for what was to come: the computer. The miracle machine Sverker came by air from the United States to Sveriges Kreditbank in December 1960. The name is an affectionate abbreviation for Sveriges Kreditbank’s electronic calculation machine, of the make RCA 501.

This time also marked the arrival of something that would in a decisive way change the relationship between the bank and the customers: the salary account. The employers now began to deposit the salary directly to the employees account instead of giving them cash in an envelope. The bank was transformed from an entity with which we were in occasional contact to something involved one’s daily finances with giro payments for bills and payments in stores with cheques.

From house calls to home computers

The banks’ contacts with the customers have varied over the years. In the 1920s a bank teller would do house calls to empty savings boxes, while in the 1960s drive-in banks came into existence. The latter was no great success, and after an elegant introduction nothing much ever came of this.

The 1970s marked the introduction of ATMs, and in 1984 the customers of Suomen Yhdys-Pankki could for the first time sit at their home computers and do their banking business. Yhdys-Pankki, the oldest Nordea forbearer in Finland, was a pioneer in the development of electronic banking services in the world during the 70s and 80s. Internet services arrived on the scene in 1996.

And here we are now. We can trade in shares from our kitchen table and in the supermarket we can withdraw cash, at the same time as the figures fly at the speed of though through cyberspace. This was far beyond what the bank teller at Sparekassen for Kjøbenhavn og Omegn or HC Andersen could possibly imagine.

Facts

• Oldest Nordea banks: Sparekassen for Kjøbenhavn og Omegn (1820), Wermlandsbanken (1832), Christiania Kreditkasse (1848), Suomen Yhdys-Pankki/Finska Föreningsbanken (1862)
• Postgirot started operating in Sweden in 1925 and became part of Nordea in 2001. The name was changed to PlusGirot in 2005.
• The letter K in PKbanken derives from Sveriges Kreditbank, and PKbanken later on became Nordbanken.
• In 2001 the Finnish-Swedish MeritaNordbanken merged with Danish Unibank and Norwegian Christiania Kreditkasse and formed Nordea. The bank now also operates in the Baltic countries, Poland and Luxembourg.