It wasn’t easy, but I eventually got a “Dankort”, and have been a happy card user ever since. You can use it virtually anywhere (if they don’t take Dankort, then they don’t take plastic at all), and it’s nice to have a log of my purchases. I have no idea where my money went during the cash-phase of my residency in Denmark.
But it hasn’t been an entirely coherent experience. My understanding at the time was that the reason I had trouble getting a Dankort is because the bank didn’t trust me, as these cards come with an automatic credit line. So one day I called them and said that I wanted a Dankort without overdraft protection or credit features. They perked right up and I had my card a week later.
But this last month has been an expensive one, and my account went negative. I went about $300 into the red, over the course of a few days and a dozen purchases, and…nothing happened. No declines, no phone calls, no letters. Today I went in to the bank and put some cash into my account, and they didn’t say a word about my being negative. The deposit didn’t even bring me back to zero — I still was about $50 short, and yet went to the store and bought groceries with no trouble.
My Danish friends tell me that this is simply the way a Dankort works. They’ll cover you up to a point (maybe around $1000?) and even then your card will still work. Recently a friend of mine did have his card declined, but he was well over $2000 in the hole. So that’s a great feature, and what’s better is that I’m told that as long as it is a reasonable amount (whatever that is), there will be no fees. That’s fantastic, and SO different from the US, where if your account goes negative even for a nanosecond, you get clobbered with every fee they can apply.
The downside of the Dankort is that charges made on the card do not show up on your account immediately, as is the case with my US debit card, which makes book-keeping more challenging. Sometimes it takes 3 days, and one purchase took a week. But on the other hand, if there’s no penalty for overdrafts, this isn’t a big deal.
Ok, those are some interesting differences, but I ran into another example of a strange banking rule today. I tried to deposit a check from the US today (which I’ve done before — they just do a currency conversion and credit your account), but this time they wouldn’t accept the check. They told me that I had to go to the “department” where I set up the account. They meant the branch. For some reason I can deposit international checks only at the branch where my account representative works. However, I’ve done this before, at the exact same branch, so it’s clearly not a technical limitation. In this case I was simply unlucky and got a trainee who is following the rules.
But what is the purpose of this rule? What possible difference could it make? It’s not as though the teller is going to call my representative over to the counter to approve the deposit. It’s bizarre, but this idea comes up over and over again. In many ways a Danish bank (or DanskeBank at any rate) is not really one company with multiple branches. It is a bunch of different banks that all have the same sign out front and collaborate on some (but definitely not all) transactions.
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