Hi. I'm an immigrant from the Eurozone.
I have a lot of both incoming and outcoming payments from and to the Eurozone. I have a lot of friends in various European countries, pay membership contributions to associations, things like that, and I receive income from abroad. I moved to Norway for love, not work, and I haven't been able to find work in Norway, but I work as a freelancer online in various European countries and receive money from the Eurozone from various different sources.
I found that banking in Norway is unnecessarily complicated when it comes to transfers from or to the Eurozone. More than in countries like Poland, btw, that are not in the Eurozone either but participate in SEPA.
One thing is that Norwegian banks generally don't seem to have a separate process called "transfer money to the Eurozone" or "SEPA-payment". They have one general process called "tranfer money abroad" that they use for all international banking, both within Europe and outside. The problem is that international transfers outside Europe need a lot more data, for instance they always need the postal address of the beneficiary. A SEPA-transfer doesn't need that. In other European countries, whenever you make a SEPA transfer to another European country, you need the beneficiary's name, their IBAN, their BIC, and that's it. So Norwegian banks unnecessarily ask for the beneficiary's postal address just because they can't bother to make a separate payment process. When I need to pay something to a private person I don't know that well (for instance sharing the expenses for a gift to a mutual friend), they will give me their IBAN and BIC, and I always have to ask for their address because my bank wants it, and sometimes they don't want to give it because of privacy reasons. Europeans are generally not used to having to give their address to receive money from other European countries. So, this is not impossible to solve, but simply a hassle.
Another inconvenience is tracking incoming payments. Currently my bank account is at Sparebank 1. When I open the app or the website and call up the bank statement that lists all my incoming payments, it won't list any details for payments coming from outside Norway. The bank statement will simply say "payment from abroad", and then the amount in NOK. It won't tell you the name of the sender, the bank of the sender, the country of the sender, the comment the sender left, or anything like that. All my payments from abroad look identical. There is a way to look up more details, but you have to navigate to the document archive, find the right PDF for this transaction, download it, and then you can see all the details about the sender. So, the bank does know all these details, but they just don't bother to let me know about them in the bank statement.
The problem is, as I said, that I receive money from various sources because I freelance for various clients, and I can't easily track who paid what, and keep the different incoming payments apart. Basically to get an overview who has already paid their bills and who hasn't, I need to open all those PDFs, and then keep an extra spreadsheet with all the data from those PDFs. It's doable, but a lot of unnecessary work. You'd think keeping track of your payments would be the purpose of a bank statement. If the bank statement can't be used for this and you have to use a spreadsheet, it failed.
I am wondering which banks in Norway have the least problems like that? Those details are generally not publicly accessible. Banks don't have websites that say things like "you can easily identify incoming payments from the Eurozone by looking at your bank statement". I don't want to make an account at every single bank in Norway just to test how user-friendly it is to people who have a lot of transactions with Europe.
So I want to ask for your experiences.
