Abstract
Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence ofbank identityand traces the historical roots of afinancial identification societyto the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.
Highlights
Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones
How is it possible that the official proof of personal identity in basic civic issues is provided by a commercial bank? Today, seven million people, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden, have digital BankIDs
The commercial banks—until serving mainly the business and the very rich— started selling a wide range of products to a broad public and marketing themselves as “department stores of finances.”3 At the same time, and as a result of this shift to retail banking, Swedish banks came to shoulder the responsibility of managing documented identities in society, which is usually associated with public authorities
Summary
Nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. The salaries and wages represented the most important part of households’ money, the banks became interested in the various social payments by the Swedish welfare state and successively came to offer financial services for handling them, for example, such as a special account for child allowance.. The salaries and wages represented the most important part of households’ money, the banks became interested in the various social payments by the Swedish welfare state and successively came to offer financial services for handling them, for example, such as a special account for child allowance.41 Another area of financial institutions’ involvement in domestic finances was consumer credit, which became more important in Sweden starting in the late 1950s. It proved difficult in the long term, as discussed below, to treat the new bank customers as a collective of employees
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