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Swedbank customers positive balance turned into negative due to an update

by dt3ft·4y ago·68 comments·view on hn ↗
This is major. Positive balance turned into negative for multiple customers.

This guy went from having a million SEK to million SEK in debt: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/marko-ligger-1-3-miljoner-minus-pa-kontot-sanslost

68 comments
Having worked in finance, what surprises me is this stuff doesn't happen more often.
I can’t imagine the stress levels the people having to deal with fixing this issue are going through right now…
I still work in finance. This is nowhere even close to the worst thing I've seen just this week.
What is the worst thing you saw this week?
A bug in dealing with fixed point numbers that caused a price to be off by a factor of 10^8.
Some code I wrote and the bugs I didn’t knew I wrote into it at the time.
I've worked in finance and compared to other industries we were more careful.
Another article in English:

https://www.thelocal.se/20220429/swedish-bank-it-fault-puts-...

And knowing banks, overdraft accounts probably just went nore negative rather than positive.

Though I don't think people would be advertising if they benefited in that way so harder to measure.

Looks like a simple UI issue, no biggie. They are used to way worse, and barely recoverable, issues created by people without a clue. Horrible sector to work in.
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.
Except that people don't have paper money at home any more so friends promise to show up with food boxes for the weekend. We live in a very digital dependent state by choice. It has benefits but also side effects.
This is definitely fuel for Germany and Austria where cash is used everywhere almost exclusively.
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...

Just realized if it's not UI, then:

Current balance: -1,000,000.

Debit: Spent money at Koenigsegg (a Swedish car brand), new balance: -1 billion.

Patch: flip - to +: new balance: 1 billion

Not just a visual bug.

People tried buying things and had their purchases denied.

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.

At some point they stop being entertaining and you just want to forget :)
Most 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)

Deutsche Bank still is going strong, despite being involved in virtually every scandal of the last decades - hell their offices got raided again just an hour ago [1].

Ordinary consumers don't give a damn about shady dealings of their banks, mostly because unlike phone numbers bank account numbers are not portable. Yes there exist regulations that banks have to assist with direct debit and automated order migration, but it's nevertheless a hassle to switch banks.

[1] https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche...

My Swedbank mortgage agreement even goes as far as to require that I use my account with them as the primary salary account.
> laundering

If you try to find a bank that isn't filled with criminal minds, you will never find one.

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.

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.

I wouldn't say that. SEB is probably the most popular.
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.

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.

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.
I spent some cash in both Norway and in Amsterdam only last month. Last two times for chocolates, believe it or not.
Same, except I never knew how they looked...
I've been living in Sweden for 6 years. Never touched any Swedish cash. I don't even know what it looks like.
You do, today....
Irregular events can’t be a barometer though. On the other side of the fence, India also rendered 80+% of its cash unusable overnight.
Had to pay my best friends rent and electricity bill because she ended up with -400000 in her account. It’ll be restored but having to go these hoops sure doesn’t build confidence in the banking system
> This guy went from having a million SEK

That's not clear from the text or video.

It is clear from the screenshot
That only shows the current negative balance.
Yeah, I believe it's very unlikely that this young guy had this much on his account. You do not get rich in Sweden.
It's really not an exorbitant amount of money, but even if he had it it seems unlikely he kept it in a savings account on Swedbank.
yet there are more billionaires per capita in Sweden than the USA.

I live in Malmo, not an expensive or high paying city; I have at one point had more than a million SEK in my bank (which is equivalent to about 100,000 USD), I was 27 at the time.

Certainly not impossible, no reason to be skeptical.