Bank account in Poland which does not use SMS

Hello

When I was living in Krakow last year I opened a bank account with Mbank which I used mainly for buying stuff on Allegro. Now I am back in the UK it turns out the account is useless. The reason being, that to make payemnts Mbank send a code to your phone by SMS which is used to authorise the payment. But this only works in Poland, once you are in another country the SMS no longer arrives.

At the moment there is something I would like to buy on allegro but I cannot find a sensible way to pay, the seller will not accept paypal and I cannot use my PL bank account :(

Does anyone know a workaround for this problem and does all Polish internet banking work in this way, using SMS to authorise payments?

Thanks in advance
Mark

not all banks use that way - I have an inteligo.pl account (which is part of PKO BP) and I have got a plastic card with gum covered codes - there is some 40 codes on the card if you run out of the codes from your card before they send you a new card (I have received a new card after about 3 years but I still have spare codes on the old one) - the thing is you still need an adress in Poland (it can be your friends address though if you have friends you can trust)

but if you have such good friends in Poland you can actually still use the mBank acount - just leave (send) them your Polish simcard (and ask them to keep your phone number alive - it is not expensive)

I have the same from Nordea - they offer either a scratchcard like you have or something called a token.

Can't you back to password list sheet? I though it's an option - one can choose sms or that paper list.

This is what we are doing actually. The problem is not related to the bank as much as it is related to the service provider you are using in the other country.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

I will look into getting the paper list of passwords, it will make like much simpler.

Many of them force this stupidity but you can refuse to change method of authorization and stay with a scratchcard.

I didn't know that in Poland there is such strange internet banking, In Lithuania you have a password card and your own password to access account.

accessing the account is something different to validating transactions - even if someone has by some chance acquired a password to your internet account s/he won't be able to make any transactions if a seperate one-time code is needed for every operation - this is what scratchcards are for or some other means

ING Bank Slaski sends me the SMS on my UK phone.

Why not get a visa debit card from BZWBK, they will only send a text to any phone when you make a transaction to let you know it went through your account

I had a problem with Citibank texts taking half an hour to arrive (by which time the transaction had expired) but only with my credit card. I told them to remove the service from my credit card but leave it on my debit card and they did that without a word of complaint.

Polish banks which USE SMS - but can send the code to a foreign number as well?

I heard good things about Mbank in general. I guess they might not be the ones that can send SMs to a foreign number.