Orsi Husz, "Bankminded: Banks As Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent.

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about her book Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden. The book traces how, from the late 1950s onwards, banks gradually became embedded in the everyday routines of ordinary people. Through wage accounts, credit cards, financial advice, and identity documents, financial institutions reshaped how households handled money—and how they thought about finance itself.

Drawing on rich archival research, Husz shows that this transformation was not simply a story of technology or markets. It involved cultural shifts around class, gender, morality, and identity, as well as the surprising role of the welfare state in expanding everyday banking. The result was what she calls the “bankification” of everyday life—a process that laid the groundwork for the financialised world we inhabit today.

If you are interested in the history of banking, the culture of finance, or how modern financial habits emerged, this conversation offers a fascinating perspective on a transformation that most of us now take for granted.

You can download the book for free (Open Access) here

Listen to the episode to learn how banks became an intimate part of everyday life.

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