Swede Success
NORDEA'S BRICK-COLORED headquarters sits like an island of calm in Stockholm's bustling commercial center. Executives in traditional suits and starched shirts roam the wood-paneled halls and confer in hushed tones. From their orderly top-floor offices, however, they peer down on quite a different scene-streets jammed with trendy businesspeople talking on tiny cell phones, as a chorus of ringing and beeping fills the air.
Don't be fooled.
These bankers know what's going on down below, and they've made sure they're a part of the action. Working out of their staid corporate offices, they've emerged as groundbreakers in electronic and wireless banking. Compare with U.S. banks, which are only now starting to attract significant numbers of online users, this pan-Nordic bank has a sophisticated set of services for its more than 1.8 million Web clients, one fifth of its total of 9 million customers throughout Sweden, Finland and Denmark. It was the first to offer banking via cell phone, and its IT staff is busy working on new wireless applications that will bring more customers into its fold. Now that several U.S. banks are also taking steps to offer wireless services, Nordea serves as a pioneering example for those headed down the same, little-explored path.
Scandinavia's early and widespread use of the Internet and cell phones have made the Nordic region an ideal laboratory for Nordea, a holding company formed when Swedish-Finnish MeritaNordbanken acquired Denmark's Unidanmark last year. The bank has also recently expanded its reach into Norway with the purchase of Christiania Bank and is also making inroads in the Baltic region. In Sweden, 42 percent of households are connected to the Internet, far greater than the figures for most European countries and equal to the usage in the United States. And Swedes, like their neighboring Finns, constantly use their cell phones to flirt, buy stocks and pay bills. In fact, more than 60 percent of Sweden's population of 9 million are cell phone users; in Stockholm, the number of cell phone users surpasses 80 percent of the population. In Finland, more than 70 percent of the country's population of 5.2 million talks on the run-the highest rate in the world.
Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly
claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century
pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin
Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?
jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith
mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive
Where Google Chrome security fails: the password
I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann
Join the conversation here
Quick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.
Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.
AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.
In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.
On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.










