I imagine that regulating banks in Finland is a lot easier than in the US (and that's an understatement), we are a small country and have a strong government influence in other ways too. Internet tells me that we have about 15 banks and most of them are national (though all won't have branches everywhere). I'm not really knowledgeable about the different types of banks but it seems to me that at least a few of the banks are sort of societies of local banks so that there will be Savings Bank of Turku and a Savings Bank of Helsinki and they are sort of the same thing but for more complicated things you'll have to visit your own branch. Then there's a bank that seems a bit like credit union that operates as a co-op but everyone can join them, I think. I've never had anything to do with those kind of banks so I don't know.
At the moment I'm a customer of two banks. One is an account I've had since I was a child and the bank was then owned by the government and part of the postal system, called Post Bank. Every post office was also a bank which was nice and we weren't tied to a certain branch like people in other banks (I knew people who had accounts in the savings bank of their home towns which was inconvenient when they moved away to study and still had to do all the more complicated things in their home town bank). Then in the 1990s it was separated from the post office, though the state still owned it and then it was merged with an insurance company and eventually sold to a Danish bank. And through all those years my account stayed the same. They have a bad reputation these days, for not really caring about customers and I'm only their customer because I got my student loan through them and it's expensive to move to another bank and because nobody else will give a credit card, they only did because I was a student with a certain amount of studies, it didn't matter that I was soon graduating and unlikely to get a job. Generally getting a credit card seems to be a lot more difficult here than in the US. My other bank won't even give me a debit card, even though I couldn't do any damage with it and am employed, though badly paid (so I have a sort of debit card that only works with certain type of card readers that always check if there are enough funds in the account and so it may not work everywhere, fortunately my other bank doesn't care and I have also a debit card from them). Most people seem to do what I do, which is to pay the credit card bill in full every month.
My other bank is also my insurance company, they started offering bank services a few years ago (as did one of the two big national chains of every possible type of shopping from department stores to restaurants to gas stations). I like them despite their refusal to give me the debit card. Most banks here aren't that interested in having lower income people as their customers and though you'll be able to get an account and won't be charged huge amount of money (my credit card bank charges me something like 30 or 40 euros a year for the credit and debit cards and for my account and nothing for online banking) you won't get any perks either. At my insurance company they've divided their services to maybe five different categories and because of my normal account, savings account (which most of the time has no savings in it), home insurance and accident insurance I cover four of them I'm in the second best class of customers despite having no money and get discounts in my insurance and don't pay anything for the bank services (or if I do it's very little). I like that. They are also quite interested in me and every year call me wanting to set up a meeting to discuss my finances, I always say that I have no money to do anything different but maybe the next time I'll go to ask about the debit card, because I'm curious.
